Solar flares threaten GPS

by billso on Wednesday, 4 April 2007

One of my recent IS 6100 assign­ments addressed the Global Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem (GPS). Ran­dolph Schmid of the AP reports that the system’s sta­bil­ity is threat­ened by pow­er­ful solar flares that are due to hit the earth some­time before 2011.

Recent find­ings indi­cate that the flares emit 10 times more radio fre­quency inter­fer­ence (RFI) than expected. The GPS satel­lites can­not broad­cast a sig­nal strong enough to over­come this sta­tic, and most civil­ian GPS receivers can’t fil­ter out the solar noise.
The arti­cle also exam­ines how IT has become depen­dent on GPS for a vari­ety of tasks that have noth­ing to do with map­ping, dri­ving or trans­porta­tion. Banks use the GPS atomic clocks to syn­chro­nize money trans­fers, for exam­ple.
In the end, the US gov­ern­ment will have to replace the GPS satel­lites with stronger mod­els, or tell users to buy new GPS equip­ment and anten­nas. My guess is that the lat­ter plan will be sug­gested, unless the Depart­ment of Defense decides that GPS sig­nal strength is a national defense priority.

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