Navigation with a suitcase sized device that doesn't rely on hundreds of thousands of satellites? Honestly this sounds great.
Not even thousands
Not even hundreds
Try 31
You're literally off by a factor of 3225
Hundred of thousands of satellites? Are you on mushrooms or something?
So, for anyone else who became curious after this exchange:
I tried to look up how many there actually are. It's hard to give a single number, since there are many different ways to count them, but vaguely speaking it's in the range of dozens to a few hundred. GPS specifically has had 83 satellites built, of which 31 are currently operational, but most of the others still exist, they're just parked in a higher orbit for retirement. There's also GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, and IRNSS/Navic. QZSS and IRNSS don't have as many satellites, and the rest are kinda roughly similar in number (e.g. GLONASS has had 146 built and 24 currently operational).
So yeah. Nowhere near hundreds of thousands. Even Starlink, which now comprises more than half of the total satellites of any kind in orbit, has only about 10,000.
GLONASS
Of all the acronyms they could have decided on, this was the correct choice.
Wait until you hear about compasses and maps!
In the middle of the ocean? Wouldn't that require a sextant, night time, and a lot of expertise?
And an extremely accurate clock (depending on how accurate you want your location to be).
It’ll get scuttled by the intelligence community so they can use it in the intelligence community.
You think there are hundreds of thousands of GPS satellites in orbit?
“Quantum sensors can sense the tiniest of changes in the gravity or magnetic field and use a previously prepared map of these properties to determine their location. Since a quantum sensor does not need to receive or send a signal to an external device, it cannot be hacked or be spoofed by a fake incoming signal either. “ Very cool!
*Cant be Non-magnetically hacked
Cue magnetic mines, but where are you getting the gravitic mines from?
If it works off tiny changes in gravity, a really big rock would work.
Our mission is to sneak this Ayers rock under the boat without being detected. In and out. 45 minutes tops.
I was going to say something about the scale of gravity changes needed, but your take is way better. Cheers.
Well, to be fair, a big rock would also work on a GPS device, if applied directly to it.
You don't need to hack the quantum sensor. You'll hack the regular computer around the sensor.
Don't these fields fluctuate in some currently not understood way?
Yes, constantly. The prepared map becomes less accurate over time.
So you constantly need updated maps. Reminds me of celestial navigation where you always need an up-to-date almanac.
Hhhmmmm, sounds perfect for the subscription model......
It's going to be missiles again isn't it?
It always is.
Two issues I have with the presentation:
A magnetic field is an external signal - the Earth's magnetic field is actually incredibly weak...
10x better performance than GNSS ... positioning accuracy of 1 nautical mile. Cheap old school handheld GPS out in the woods was accurate better than 10 feet most of the time, so what in this performance is 10x better? 10x more resistant to jamming? Seems like it should be completely impervious to jamming. 1 nm accuracy is useful, but hardly better performance.
For those confused:
nm means Nautical mile here, not nano meter
Its better performance than existing non-gps systems - not better than GPS. For ships , being within 1nm after thousands of miles of travel is really well performing. Obvious the real play here is weaponry though, since GPS isnt reliable in warfare and on-board sensors can do the detail work of target identification once in an area, the hard part is a way for them to self navigate accurately over long distances without GPS.
The realer play is submarines. You don't get any satellite signal at all underwater. Before this it was only INS or dead reckoning.
The trouble with Quantum Navigation is you might end up where you were trying to go, but at a random point in the past where you have to change history to put right something that once went wrong.
As long as you keep it below 88 miles per hour you'll be fine.
Great, now I know my velocity but I don't know where I am.
The team achieved 10 times better performance than GNSS systems, with a one nautical mile of positioning accuracy.
Variation up to a full nautical mile doesn't seem very accurate?
this article is better written:
it maintained bounded position accuracy within 1 nautical mile over an 83-kilometer trajectory. This performance, achieved without access to satellite navigation, represents a more than tenfold improvement over standard navigation-grade inertial backup systems under similar conditions.
It also doesn't pretend the page failed to load when it detects an ad blocker.
Here is the real article without the compounding editorial errors.
That's comparable to what a skilled navigator can do with a sextant and chronometer. That's more than enough accuracy to cross the ocean and get close enough to the port that you can see it.
If I were in the middle of the ocean I couldn't find my location within 100 nautical miles without GPS so I'm pretty impressed
Here is the paper
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25563
And here is the easier to read press release from Q-CTRL with less errors and ad block black screens.
Using quantum sensors, the company achieved ten times the accuracy of conventional satellite-based navigation systems, while maintaining the one nautical mile positioning accuracy.
Don't we use GPS accurate to within centimeters for construction?
High-end dual-frequency receivers ($$$) can do this, yes. But the earth's magnetic field is not controlled by any government or military entities. This is pretty big
Yes and no. They often use GPS assisted by beacons. Those beacons are often set up using both high quality GPS but also surveying tools, and you might have seen markers in the ground on cities which was placed using very well calibrated tools so it has a well known very precise precision. Those beacons are easier to track for other machinery because they are so much closer so the radio signal is much clearer and angular precision is much better
Perfect for autonomous military robots.
The only significant word here is "quantum". This stuff is too expensive to be useful for anyone other than the military right now. Gravity maps are controlled information as well. Used for ballistic submarine missiles. The maps created by the military will never be made public. (It would look like a highway of where every vessel is or will be)The accuracy of satellite measurements is 3km, with physical topographic (sea/land) resolution at 1.2km. The long-term plan is to have these sensors traverse areas, record data, and then share it with a database. Even those maps are realistically only 300m~ in resolution. Compare that to GPS, which has a nominal resolution of 3m with 15 satellites, or about a foot, with a correction from ground relays. (I remember using a handheld device that would tell you how many you were connected to, and it stopped working once you were near a tree.) Gravimeters have been used by submarines since the 1980s.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
