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Russian satellites have caused GPS outages of as long as 10 seconds across Europe, according to a new research paper, authored in part by GNSS expert Todd Humphreys.
Humphreys is head of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. Separate research by Richard Bowden at Spanish company GMV supports the findings, according to The New York Times.
In at least three of 75 instances identified since 2019, the interference originated from as many as three Russian satellites. The other cases implicate the same Russian early-warning network; though data is insufficient to pinpoint the source, the same type of signal was identified.
Whether Russia knows of the interference — and its motives — is unknown, but the signals disrupt GPS, Galileo and BeiDou, and not Russia’s own GLONASS. The press office for the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. told The Times it had no comment.
The paper, “Chasing Lightning: Detecting, Characterizing, and Identifying a Powerful Space-Based GNSS Interference Source” by Zachary L. Clements, Argyris Kriezis and Todd E. Humphreys, can be accessed here.
The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the GNSS interference phenomenon: wide-area transient interference from a space-based source causing up to 10-dB GNSS degradation across Europe since 2019 in the L1 band. The interference’s spatial, temporal and spectral properties are detailed. The researchers designed a framework to detect events using 1-Hz carrier-to-noise ratio observables from a network of 165 reference stations.
The three satellites implicated in the interference are part of Russia’s Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema (EKS) constellation, which detects missile launches and nuclear explosions around the world. The first instance of this widespread jamming was recorded in October 2019, a month after the first EKS satellite was launched.
These cases are among the first known examples of GPS interference originating from space. Two historic cases of satellite interference were caused by technical glitches.
