GPS Satellites, Israel-Palestine & Ukraine war
GPS Satellites, Israel-Palestine & Ukraine war
India launched its own NAVIC GPS system. Its importance emerges again in the current Israel-Palestine and Ukraine wars. Let us understand how.
The GPS is a critical component of modern-day life. In fact, paper map reading skills have declined drastically thanks to easy access to map-software on our phones. But there are some interesting things to talk about this systems.
Soviet Russia initiated the development of Sputnik Satellites, triggering the space race. Soviets managed to create a system called Parus in 1974.
The US managed to use satellite signals for tracking through various projects including Transit, Timation etc. and launched the GPS system in 1973.
Global Position System (GPS) was initially used by the US military, just as Soviets were using their Parus system.
In 1983, a Korean Air Lines Flight 007 experienced navigation error and was shot down by the Soviets. Thereafter it was decided to give GPS access to everyone.
So there was no incentive to build out your own GPS system.
But there was…
US and Russia (Soviet Russia and later Russia itself) started building weapons using GPS tracking.
These weapons, mostly missiles and guided bombs, were incredibly accurate. US gave a demonstration of these technologies in Operation Desert Storm.
The method of protection against enemy or non-friendly countries using GPS was deny the access to it. This was done using the Selective Availability function on the GPS satellites. Selective Availability was discarded in 2003.
More recently, US gave GPS guided artillery systems to Ukraine. The are lower cost high impact systems. However, these U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) are being scuttled. It is estimated that some Electronic warfare technique was used to increase errors to such a degree that GPS guidance was useless.
As per their 2003 policy, the US maintains the capability to prevent hostile use of GPS and its augmentations while retaining a military advantage in a theater of operations without disrupting or degrading civilian uses outside the theater of operations. To protect itself against such GPS enabled weapons the US also manipulates the GPS signal. This increased the errors and results in mistracking.
Why India developed its own GPS system?
US denied the use of GPS to India during Kargil War of 1999. This prevented Indian precision bombing of high altitude targets. Instead India had to use Israeli laser guidance systems to achieve its objectives. But this opened the eyes of India who thereafter developed its own GPS system called the NAVIC.
What has happened to HiMARS and the manipulating algorithms used on GPS mean that India’s decision to develop and use NAVIC
Today there are following Global Navigation Satellite Systems:
The Russian Global Navigation Satellite System, GLONASS, in 1982;
China introduced their system BeiDou in 2000;
Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS) in 2010;
the European Union launched Galileo in 2005; and,
India’s Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) in 2013, now known as NavIC.
Notes:
How the modern GPS system works?
Simply speaking:
GPS navigation depends upon multiple satellites.
Each of these satellites broadcast their location and time at regular intervals.
Your device reads the signals from multiple satellites (at least 4) and then triangulates its position on the surface.
This calculation is reasonably accurate but still there is some error. You can see the error as a circle on Google Maps.
Modern GPS devices also correct the error using other inputs (Wifi Signal, location of other phones or GPS enabled devices nearby etc.)