From the Heartland to the Arctic, Starlink and OneWeb are redefining navigation

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From the Heartland to the Arctic, Starlink and OneWeb are redefining navigation

New system delivers accurate positioning where GPS falters, study reveals

As disruptions to GPS services increase globally, radio signals from low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites could become reliable navigation alternatives, a new study suggests.

From transportation and telecommunications to finance and public infrastructure, nearly all sectors depend on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)such as GPSfor critical positioning, navigation and timing information. Yet as these signals are highly susceptible to interference like intentional jamming and spoofing, new technologies are needed to counter this dependence.

Now, by exploiting signals from the Starlinkand OneWebconstellations - satellites primarily used to deliver secure internet connectivity - researchers found they could be used to improve ship navigation accuracy in the Arctic, an area where GPS coverage and signals are typically degraded. Results showed that exploiting Starlink and OneWeb LEO signals with height data from a ship sailing off the west coast of Greenlandsignificantly increased navigation accuracy, effectively reducing errors from more than a kilometer (without GPS) to 27 meters.

Being able to yield more precise navigation data in such a challenging region like the Arctic means that safe and effective satellite "eavesdropping" may be feasible from nearly anywhere on Earth, said Zak Kassas, co-author of the study and TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University.

"When you lose GPS on a plane or a ship there is no solution at the time being," said Kassas, who is also director of Ohio State's Department of Transportation Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation (CARMEN)."What we showed is that there are solutions ready to be deployed in the field with existing systems."

The studywas recently presented at the43rd IEEE Military Communications Conferencein Los Angeles. It won the IEEE Frederick W. Ellersick Awardfor the Best Paper in the Unclassified Technical Program.

This work builds off previous work from Kassas' ASPINlab that was the first to exploit Starlink for positioning. Efforts to scale up that research led the team to seek ways to improve their system using ground receivers that can passively listen to frequencies emitted from multiple LEO satellite constellations. Since then, Kassas' team has demonstrated navigation with LEO satellites across the U.S., from St. Louison a stationary receiver, to Pittsburghon a ground vehicle, to Albuquerqueon an extremely high-altitude balloon, to Columbus on a ground vehicleand a drone. In their latest experiment, they decided to leave the heartland.

In this experiment, they decided to test their work in the Arctic, as OneWeb's 600 satellites are plentiful near the north and south poles, while Starlink's more than 7,000 satellites are present across all other latitudes.

"We can be smart about what we have already in the environment and use it to navigate," said Kassas. "Ambient signals, whether they are terrestrialor non-terrestrial (such as LEO), are extremely useful for navigation if you know how to use them."

According to Kassas, the researchers did not need assistance from the satellite operators (SpaceX and Eutelsat) to use the signals, and they emphasized that they had no access to the actual data being sent through the satellites - only to publicly available information related to the satellites' downlink transmission frequency and a rough estimate of the satellites' location.

This discovery, that even satellites that were not intended for navigation can be repurposed and tailored for location services, means that substantially advancing next-gen GNSS systems may be closer and more affordable than researchers thought. According to the study, these results have vital implications for aerospace and defense, and more importantly, because signals from LEO satellites are thousands of times more powerful than GNSS, they would be more secure and much harder to interrupt by bad actors.

"If someone wants to interfere with LEO signals, they would have to put more effort into it," said Kassas. The study also suggests that better navigation signal security might lower the risk of international incidents, as many officials suspect escalating cyberattacks caused both the Strait of Hormuz ship collisionand the downing of the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243.

"Those cyberattacks on GPS are becoming the bread and butter of electronic warfare, and it's spilling over to civilian systems," said Kassas. Unsurprisingly, these issues mean that scientists and policymakers can't afford to wait years to engineer new GNSS workarounds. Instead, the team feels that implementing the systems they've presented may be where optimization lies.

"Our approach is economical, alleviating the need to build and operate new dedicated navigation systems, and sustainable, preserving the scarce spectrum and our space environment, so we believe it will be integrated into future navigation systems," said Kassas. "We are showing that this dream can be a reality."

Other co-authors include Will Barrett and Sharbel Kozhaya from Ohio State and David Marsh from The Wilson Center.

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