On November 23, the OFFICE of Naval Research (ONR) announced that it is working on a new navigation technology based on muons instead of GPS. "Unlike GPS signals, cosmic ray muons are a natural source of radiation that can pass through rocks, buildings and the Earth, and can be used at high latitudes north of the Arctic Circle, wher GPS satellites cannot function properly due to orbital limitations," the ONR's external announcement says.
In September, the OFFICE of Naval Research (ONR) and the U.S. Army Development Command co-funded the Global-X Challenge, which aims to develop new navigation solutions for the Arctic wher GPS is not available.
A multinational team of researchers from Finland, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States won this year's Global-X Challenge. They hope to show that muons can be used as an alternative to GPS and still provide the same level of accuracy. Their goal is to demonstrate within nine months a proof-of-concept alternative navigation system for the Arctic that could be a game changer for future military activities.
"As climate change opens up Arctic shipping lanes for commercial and military activity, the ability to navigate the polar region will become increasingly important in the coming decades," said Dr. Charles Eddy, ONR global chief scientific Director for the Muon project: "Using cosmic relativistic particles that continuously strike the entire surface of the Earth, the project offers an innovative approach to the navigation challenges of high latitudes with little or no GPS service."
Maintaining navigation capabilities is now a big problem, especially as countries such as the United States, Russia and China develop new ways to block satellite navigation.
"From a civilian point of view, the most important support for the Space Force is that we have GPS," space Operations Officer Capt. Natalia Pinto said in a Space Force promotional video in August. "It's something that individuals, companies, banks and all kinds of financial institutions need. So from the outside, that's probably the most important thing we have."
Today, multinational militaries use GPS every day to guide ships, planes, bombs and many other devices. But these signals can easily be jammed by jammers, which block GPS signals, and spoofing devices that take them over and provide false information to users, defense magazine reported on spoofing muon technology in February.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, muons are one of the basic subatomic particles, somewhat like electrons but much heavier. Muons on Earth are produced by collisions between particles in the earth's atmosphere and cosmic rays, which come from high-energy photons and atomic nuclei from the Sun or other solar systems or galaxies. Muons exist for only 2.2 microseconds, but they are constantly created in the atmosphere, hitting every inch of the earth's surface and passing through almost any matter at almost the speed of light.
Since muons have the ability to penetrate almost any substance, they can be useful for figuring out wher they are underground or underwater.
"Cosmic ray muons are ubiquitous and universal," the researchers wrote in a 2020 study on muons published in Nature. With this general and relativistic property, the cosmic muon could be used as a receiving and detecting device for precise underwater and underground positioning.
The same goes for sailing north of the Arctic Circle. The US Navy-funded research using muons for navigation was led by Dr Chris Steele of the UK's Geographical Infrastructure Survey LTD. "Just like echolocation, the time difference between the 'pings' -- signals from crossed muons in our detectors -- allows the user to measure the distance from one detector to another, with multiple detectors allowing positioning by triangulation," Steele explained.
The researchers have already tested the system in a large immersion tank in the UK. The project will now move to Finland with the aim of entering an arctic lake covered in a metre of ice. "At these high latitudes, traditional GPS measurements are problematic due to orbital limitations." The purpose of the study is mentioned in the official ONR press release.
To make it work, researchers need a set of highly synchronized clocks that can operate partially underwater in the cold Arctic environment. If it does work, it will be a major advance for military navigation.
"The ocean is basically transparent to cosmic ray muons, so we expect to generate new seafloor navigation." The researchers are confident about the technology's future.
Muons are not the only alternative to GPS. In recent years, the U.S. Navy has renewed its focus on celestial navigation. Senior rand engineers have even suggested that the U.S. military could build automated astronomical navigation systems to tag military personnel in real time.
At a higher technological level, quantum science may soon be used as a "hack-proof" alternative to GPS. "These inertial sensors can be used anywher location or navigation information is needed, as well as wher GPS interruption or GPS is not available is unacceptable." Peter Schwinter, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories who is working on quantum navigation, said: "Civilian applications, such as aviation and self-driving cars, are not able to accept a temporary interruption of GPS signals. GPS is also not available underground or underwater, so inertial navigation is very important for these operating environments."
Between quantum science and muons, military navigation is becoming more science fiction than just reading maps. As complicated as it sounds, scientists are hopeful about what might happen next.
