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Pending Solar Flares Could Throw GPS Accuracy Off by 30 Feet

by Caleb Johnson on February 10, 2010 at 11:10 AM

You might not realize it, but satellite navigation has become widely used in everyday life. Not only do drivers use it to get from point A to point B, but large ships use it to safely dock, the military employs it for a variety of purposes, and emergency vehicles depend on it to save lives.

That makes a recent report from BBC News troublesome. A number of U.K. researchers say that solar flares will soon increase on the face of the sun, causing the accuracy of GPS devices to be thrown off by over 30 feet (about 10 meters). That might not sound like too much, but if we're talking about a bomb hitting a target, or a ship sliding into a dock, those meters are critical. You see, when satellite navigation became en vogue, activity on the sun's surface was low. But scientists predict it will soon ramp up. The radiation given off by these solar flares would change the makeup of the Earth's ionosphere, which would cause delays in how quickly data makes it from satellite to receiver. That could cause triangulation errors and create the potential for disaster.

This wouldn't be the first time scientists worried that Mother Nature would interfere with satellite navigation, but it certainly sounds serious, especially when you consider the fact that some Cornell researchers predicted it back in 2006. What's worse, there's not much we can do to prevent this occurrence with current technology. Looks like the sun giveth, and it taketh away. [From: BBC News, via: Engadget]


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Tags: gps, navigation, satellite, scifi, solar flares, sun, top

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