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And you can even update your clock info from the GPS signal. So the only dependency is GPS or similar.

But would Iranian missiles even use GPS? Isn't accuracy limited for civilian use for precisely this reason?


No. The US stopped degrading civilian GPS accuracy in 2001[1]. Although the US retains the ability to degrade civilian GPS in specific target areas.

Regardless, if you’re building a long range missile, you need some ability for it to navigate. If you’re not using GPS, then what would you use instead? Additionally there’s nothing preventing you from using multiple navigation systems in tandem and fusing the results together, which is almost certainly what these missile do.

Sensor fusion reduces the impact of stuff like GPS jamming, but certainly doesn’t eliminate it. The over all system will be less accurate with fewer inputs, and if you’re the one faced with a high speed missile flying at you, I suspect you’ll take every edge you can get, regardless of how small the impact might be.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Globa...

>Regardless, if you’re building a long range missile, you need some ability for it to navigate. If you’re not using GPS, then what would you use instead?

US ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles use a combination of inertial and celestial navigation: in space of course there are no clouds to obscure the stars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_navigation#:~:text=I...

Many cruise missiles use terrain contour mapping. In principle at least it seems like it should work for airplanes too.
Doesn't really work if you're trying to navigate over an ocean. Cruise missile also operate over relatively short distances (1,000km - 5,000km, most being 1,000km - 3,000km) compared to long haul flights, plus they also fly at very low altitudes (which helps them avoid enemy radar) which makes terrain contour mapping easier.

Not to mention, if you're designing a cruise missile, you're not that bother about how your navigation system might interfere with other aircraft, or ground systems in the area. I doubt having thousands of planes flying around shooting radar straight down at the ground would work particularly well.

A error correction technique I learned as a young land surveying assistant is to put a gps antenna on a known fixed point location. The delta between the fixed point and the point of measurement is cancelled out to get a more accurate read.

We did this to trial some new (at the time) surveying equipment when the primary equipment was optical. It would save time for really long measurements through the forest and mountainous terrain .

You can even subscribe to services which do this for you! There are a few companies with large-scale networks of fixed receivers, and you can get the observed offset from a node near you via the internet, usually via "NTRIP".

Getting correction data from a node a few dozen kilometers away isn't quite as good as having your own fixed base station a stone's throw away, but it's way more convenient and for a lot of applications plenty accurate.

GPS Accuracy used to be limited, but that ended decades ago.

There are rules about GPS hardware that say that they should cease working above certain speeds and altitudes for guided missile purposes. But that is a firmware issue. I’m sure the Iranians have figured that out if the are even using off the shelf hardware.

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