DARPA Working On New GPS Systems That Needs No Satellites

DARPA is always working on developing new technologies to help the military perform tasks that will protect the country and often that tech spills over into civilian life as well. One of the things that DARPA is working on right now is a reinvention of the GPS system that doesn't rely on satellites. This reinvention is part of DARPA's goal of ensuring American superiority in the air, maritime, ground, space, and cyber domains.

The new DARPA positioning system wouldn't rely on satellites to operate and would be resistant to jamming. The current system is vulnerable to attack since the satellites are unprotected in orbit. Eventually this new system would be used by GPS systems in cars and by our cell phones.

DARPA has released a paper that hints it plans to develop a positioning system that needs no satellites. The paper says that DARAP is investing in technologies that have the potential to deliver GPS accuracy and timing information for military systems including inertial measurement devices that use cold-atom interferometry, chip-scale self-calibrating gyroscopes, accelerometers, clocks, and pulsed-laser enables atomic clocks and microwave sources.

That all sounds very sci-fi, but DARPA has certainly invented things in the past that sounded like fiction and has a habit of making that type of thing a reality. DARPA is also focusing on gaining insight into content from massive data sets and automated cyber defense and developing more secure systems and insuring privacy.

SOURCE: Extremetech