In addition to providing high-speed Internet connections even in the most remote corners of the Earth, more than 3
Although all Starlink satellites supportnon-geostationary location in low Earth orbit, and GPS satellites follow one of six different orbits, making two revolutions around the planet every day, they have one thing in common: they transmit signals to the Earth's surface. Earth. Starlink signals are delivered to the internet, and signals from multiple GPS satellites are used by navigation devices to triangulate their exact position on the planet.
Todd Humphreys and a team of researchers fromThe University of Texas at Austin Radio Navigation Lab realized that Starlink could also serve as an accurate and reliable backup of the Global Positioning System, but SpaceX eventually decided that this was not a priority for the company and stopped working with researchers. The UT Austin team didn't really need deep knowledge of what the Starlink satellites were transmitting, they just needed signals that SpaceX couldn't hide.
Turning Starlink into a navigation system waswould have been easy with SpaceX, but without him it took Humphreys' team almost two years to reach their goal. They started by buying a Starlink terminal and a service that was used to stream HD videos to YouTube with tennis legend Rafael Nadal 24 hours a day. The setup was paired with a nearby antenna, which was used to detect the regularly repeated timing signals used by the Starlink service to help ground receivers stay in touch with satellites. They have never attempted to crack or break the encryption that Starlink uses to provide its services exclusively to its subscribers.
These repetitive timing signalsare sent at precisely set intervals: four sequences every millisecond, which is an approach that the GPS system also uses. Combined with information about the movement of Starlink satellites, information that SpaceX willingly shares online to help reduce the risk of costly collisions with other companies' equipment, the source of the signal and how far away that satellite is can be used to calculate. receiver location with an accuracy of about 30 meters.
This is far from the potential millimeterthe accuracy that can be achieved with a GPS system using advanced receiving equipment (hardware used by the US military), but Humphreys, who recently shared his team's work on deciphering the structure of the Starlink signal in a non-peer-reviewed article, believes that if SpaceX decides to cooperate, simple software updates and additional data encoded in the timing signals can improve positioning accuracy to less than a meter, comparable to the accuracy of consumer GPS equipment.
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