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Quantum alternative to GPS navigation will be tested on US military spaceplane
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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This sounds pretty fancy.
Commercial aircraft get their location from multiple places including GPS, ground based facilities (VOR's), IRS, etc. IRS is what I'm used to calling it, but it's the same as INS, which is what this article is talking about.
It determines location by keeping track of rotation, acceleration, etc. It's often called "dead reckoning" because it just gives the best guess, and you don't know how accurate it is. There are multiple of these devices on each aircraft, and they compare their locations to the other sources and if one is drifting way further than the rest, it gets ignored. That's a very basic explanation because how it really works is way above my knowledge level.
It's very cool how these devices find their location, though. When you first boot the system up, it spends about 5 minutes measuring the rotation of the Earth. For this reason, you can't reset it when in motion. Based on what it feels it can determine your exact location on the surface of the earth.
Hmmm so in the future we will have AI best guessing planes locations? Ye haw.
I doubt it'll ever be used on commercial aircraft, since they do have GPS and all the other things there isn't really any point adding a yet another system. Especially because it requires cooling, if it gets too warm it stops working, and buy too warm I mean the temperature of interplanetary space is too warm. Basically has to be absolute zero or bust.