The Army is in the midst of testing new assured position, navigation and timing equipment (A-PNT) as it searches for more ways to thwart jamming and spoofing and stay operational if GPS is denied or unavailable.
A live demonstration in the North Sea used the Galileo Search and Rescue (SAR) service to initiate an emergency rescue in three and a half minutes after a “person in distress” operated her Galileo-enabled personal locator beacon (PLB) from a small life raft, adrift on the open water.
For the first time, a sophisticated GPS-guided Naval Strike Missile fired from the deck of a U.S. combat ship sailing in the Indo-Pacific region.
The USS Gabrielle Giffords launched the precision strike weapon, which “can find and destroy enemy ships at distances up to 100 nautical miles away,” according to a U.S. Navy statement. The NSM flies at high subsonic speed an “at sea-skimming altitude, has terrain-following capability and uses an advanced seeker for precise targeting in challenging conditions.”
The NSM can navigate by GPS, inertial and terrain reference systems. It is able to fly over and around landmasses, travel in sea skim mode, and make random avoidance maneuvers in the terminal phase. An imaging infrared (IIR) seeker and an onboard target database give NSM independent detection, recognition, and discrimination capabilities for targets at sea or on the coast. Its design and materials endow it with stealth capabilities. It weighs slightly over 400 kg (880 pounds) and has a range of at least 185 km (100 nm).
Known for its “sea-skimming” capability, the Naval Strike Missile can fly at very low altitudes over water and land. Photo: Kongsberg
The Navy Strike Missile launch was part of exercise Pacific Griffin, in the Philippine Sea near Guam, an exercise conducted with the Singaporean navy. It marked the second time such a missile was launched, but the first time it was fired in the Indo-Pacific region, according to the Navy.
Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10) launches a Naval Strike Missile (NSM) during exercise Pacific Griffin. The NSM is a long-range, precision strike weapon that is designed to find and destroy enemy ships. Pacific Griffin is a biennial exercise conducted in the waters near Guam aimed at enhancing combined proficiency at sea while strengthening relationships between the U.S. and Republic of Singapore navies. U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Shannon Renfroe/Released.
The Navy awarded Raytheon a contract in 2018 for the weapons system, developed around the missile designed by Norwegian firm Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace.
Ivan Revnivykh’s life and experience encompass the far frontiers of his homeland, Russia, from the magnifi cent landscapes of the country’s Pacifi c coast to research stations in Antarctica, to the great capital city of Moscow where he lives and works today. To everything he does he brings a sense of excitement and adventure.
Every GNSS has experienced a failure. On January 26, 2016, an error in the GPS data upload system caused incorrect data to be transmitted from the satellites on the L1 band used by most commercial GPS receivers. Th e problem was resolved within six hours, although some users experienced problems for as much as twelve hours. Th e next day, the US Air Force (USAF) released a full statement explaining that the problem was caused by ground system soft ware when one satellite was decommissioned.
Seventeen years after federal regulators restricted a promising wireless technology to protect GPS and other spectrum users, they are being asked to loosen those limitations. Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) proponents insist the strictures are too tight and cut off their ability to innovate. In June, Robert Bosch LLC formally requested the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) do what it said it would do back in April 2002: reexamine controls on UWB that the FCC itself called “extremely conservative” when they were written. The request is not to change the rules—not just yet anyway—but for the FCC to launch a rulemaking process that could eventually lead to changes in the rules. And Bosch wants a lot of changes.
Due to the proliferation of personal privacy devices and other jamming sources, it is imperative for safety-critical GNSS users such as airports and marine ports to be situationally aware of local GNSS interference. This article proposes and validates an enhanced method for geolocating GNSS interference sources so that jammers and spoofers can be found and disabled.
The introduction of a new generation of mass-market chips based on multi GNSS dual frequency measurements, already being commercialized and integrated in smartphones by major manufacturers, is contributing to a new level of positioning accuracy in the mass-market location-based services.
Gen. John E. Hyten, an officer deeply familiar with the GPS program whose testimony before Congress underscored the need to protect satellite navigation frequencies, was confirmed Thursday by the Senate to be vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s second highest ranking military officer.
A European aviation industry alliance will deploy new-generation GNSS-based landing systems, ground-based augmentation systems or GBAS, at airports across the continent, starting this year and gaining momentum in 2020. The GBAS Alliance includes airlines and aircraft manufacturers who will complementarily equip their planes with GBAS reception equipment. GBAS is recognized as a supplement to and future replacement of instrument landing systems (ILS).
Juniper Systems today announced the release of the Geode GNS2 Sub-meter GPS Receiver. This new release of the Geode now features connectivity with a range of iPhone and iPad devices providing users with an even more versatile and powerful tool, according to the company.
The introduction of a new generation of mass-market chips based on multi GNSS dual frequency measurements, already being commercialized and integrated in smartphones by major manufacturers, is contributing to a new level of positioning accuracy in the mass-market location-based services.
The European GNSS Agency (GSA) has opened a call for proposals for implementation of Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OS-NMA) and/or Integrity Navigation Message (I/NAV) features in close-to-market receivers and/or GNSS user terminals. The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2019.