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NASA Overcomes Military’s GPS Tweaks To Peer Inside Hurricanes (sciencemag.org) 37
The U.S. military runs the GPS system, and in January 2017, it began to boost the radio power on 10 of its GPS satellites as they passed over a broad region centered on northern Syria. The power boosts, which can thwart jamming, have recurred without warning, each lasting several hours. The swings don’t interfere with other scientific uses of GPS. But they threw off the constellation’s measurements of high winds by 5 meters a second or more — the difference between a category-2 and category-3 hurricane. After 2 years of work, the CYGNSS team has compensated by reprogramming its satellites on the fly. The satellites carry large antennas to catch reflected GPS signals, but they also have small antennas that receive direct GPS signals, for tracking time and location. The team repurposed the small antennas to measure the signal strength of the GPS satellites, making it possible to correct the wind speed measures
- If you’re trying to jam the GPS signals in your country, you already know there are military operations happening.
Who said anything about trying? Do you wait for an enemy to try and shoot you before putting on a bullet proof vest? I will bet you a testicle that this is being done preemptively precisely when a military operation is taking place.
- by jpaine619 ( 4874633 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @08:10AM (#58754932)
The power boosts, which can thwart jamming, have recurred without warning, each lasting several hours.
The military isn’t messing with power levels on a whim. I think it’s safe to assume they had tactical or strategic reasons for doing this. Don’t see why they’d need to consult with the broader scientific community to do with their satellites as they please..
If you’re not in the military and you’re using the GPS system, you’re a guest. It’s been like that since day one. I remember during the first gulf war they fuzzed the civilian bands to make them less accurate. This was supposedly done to prevent the opposition from using our own technology against us. Only the encrypted military bands were kept to a high degree of accuracy.
- Yes, it is a system designed for navigation by the military for their use. They are nice and let others use it…for navigation. It was never designed to analyze the wind speeds in hurricanes. If you are using it for a purpose it wasn’t designed for, it is up to you to make it work.
- Yeah but the military is paid for by civilian tax dollars, which means the military should defer to civilians. We pay their paycheck after all so they should serve and defer to any civilian and all civilians. They dont. But they should.
So what you are saying is that military equipment that could be used by adversaries to attack the military or US should be given to civilians? F22’s for everyone!!!
We pay them to do a certain job. In order to do that job, they need to mess with the GPS signal strength. We don’t pay them to defer to civilians. We pay them to break other people’s stuff, preferably without breaking the stuff we bought them to help them break other peopl’s stuff. They are not policemen. They are not social workers.
They were doing this because other factions operating in the region were testing (and potentially more than testing) latest generation GPS jamming technology and monitoring how it disrupts US forces. Obviously having critical signals jammed in a life theatre was not an acceptable option, which is most likely why these signals were boosted.
- by PPH ( 736903 ) on Thursday June 13, 2019 @10:46AM (#58755490)
Adversaries monitor GPS signal strength as evidence of possible impending US missions.
- Missions… Really sure coats it doesn’t it. Call it what it is. Attacks and acts of terrorism by the US.
lol, story boils down to “We made a huge oversight and then fixed it”
It’s more like: “The source was always a constant output level, and we modified our system when the military decided to make it variable.”
GPS satellites don’t “pass over” anything, they are stationary, that’s the whole point!
There’s nothing more amusing than condescension from someone who is provably wrong [gps.gov].
The government says GPS satellites orbit twice a day at ~20,000 km. Compare to geosync at ~36,000 km.
Plus, think about it: Why would GPS receivers need almanac data if the satellites were geostationary? If that were the case, they would only need ephemeris.
Like any hack that uses a non-public interface, it is prone to being broken. Every hacker worth his salt knows this (and has most likely fell victim to it).
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