it maintained bounded position accuracy within 1 nautical mile over an 83-kilometer trajectory. This performance, achieved without access to satellite navigation, represents a more than tenfold improvement over standard navigation-grade inertial backup systems under similar conditions.
Experience navigators with some basic tools often ended up hundreds and hundreds of miles off course because they had no reference points. If you’re navigation system is landmarks plus a sextant then it’s not going to be very accurate.
When you’re trying to transit the ocean one nautical miles worth of accuracy isn’t bad, especially if the alternative is to use a potentially compromised GPS or a 15th century navigation tool.
That’s comparable to what a skilled navigator can do with a sextant and chronometer. That’s more than enough accuracy to cross the ocean and get close enough to the port that you can see it.
The only thing I can think is that they’re comparing with a single system (e.g. GPS or BeiDou), even though GNSS receivers will combine all four systems to get very high accuracy (a few metres).
GPS is actually far more accurate than that. There is deterministic jitter introduced to make civilian use cases precise to only a few meters, but military equipment has the algorithm to subtract that jitter and achieve precision measured in centimeters.
Anyway, that statement is highly misleading. They were comparing to previous inertial navigation systems, not GPS navigation.
Is that true globally? I seem to remember that some ocean areas wouldn’t have as many satellites visible as e.g. polar orbits don’t visit all of the globe.
Yeah, I agree that I didnt understand that bit. I also didn’t understand why you need a quantum sensor to follow a map of gravitational and magnetic anomalies for orientation.
Variation up to a full nautical mile doesn’t seem very accurate?
this article is better written:
https://science.report/discover/quantum-gravimeter-demonstrates-gps-free-navigation-in-coral-sea-trial-86654/
It also doesn’t pretend the page failed to load when it detects an ad blocker.
Inertial navigation (INSS) and GNSS (Sat nav)is two completely different concepts. Too bad the article misses this. Perhaps AI hallucinations?
No, it’s saying it works better than INSS, without resorting to GNSS.
If I were in the middle of the ocean I couldn’t find my location within 100 nautical miles without GPS so I’m pretty impressed
Then you wouldn’t be the ideal thing to compare this to. An experienced navigator with a couple basic tools could do similarly.
Okay, so it’s as good as an experienced navigator, that seems pretty good to me!
Experience navigators with some basic tools often ended up hundreds and hundreds of miles off course because they had no reference points. If you’re navigation system is landmarks plus a sextant then it’s not going to be very accurate.
When you’re trying to transit the ocean one nautical miles worth of accuracy isn’t bad, especially if the alternative is to use a potentially compromised GPS or a 15th century navigation tool.
That’s comparable to what a skilled navigator can do with a sextant and chronometer. That’s more than enough accuracy to cross the ocean and get close enough to the port that you can see it.
Maybe GNSS stands for maGNetic compaSs and Sextant?
The only thing I can think is that they’re comparing with a single system (e.g. GPS or BeiDou), even though GNSS receivers will combine all four systems to get very high accuracy (a few metres).
20 years ago we had only GPS, and it already was accurate to 10 or 20 meters.
GPS is actually far more accurate than that. There is deterministic jitter introduced to make civilian use cases precise to only a few meters, but military equipment has the algorithm to subtract that jitter and achieve precision measured in centimeters.
Anyway, that statement is highly misleading. They were comparing to previous inertial navigation systems, not GPS navigation.
Didn’t they turn all that jitter off like 15 years ago?
Is that true globally? I seem to remember that some ocean areas wouldn’t have as many satellites visible as e.g. polar orbits don’t visit all of the globe.
Yeah, I agree that I didnt understand that bit. I also didn’t understand why you need a quantum sensor to follow a map of gravitational and magnetic anomalies for orientation.