A Modern Horror Story - Part IV
Every Halloween we present a familiar horror story:
You wake up. Emergency and rescue radios are down.
Your location app is offline and planes are grounded worldwide.
You attempt to go shopping, but the credit card isn't working. The ATM is down, too.
As the day progresses both cell and internet service are lost, stores and restaurants are closed, and you can't even get gas.
By the next morning the power is out.
The cause? GPS is down.
Think it can't happen? Consider the events of January 26, 2016.
In the early morning hours, emergency radios went offline in the US and Canada, and communications and digital broadcasts around the world started to fail. Even power grids started to malfunction as network engineers scrambled frantically to prevent a global communication meltdown.
The culprit: a 13 microsecond error in the timing from GPS.
But, like most horror movies, there was a happy ending. Engineers found the cause was a simple ground software glitch when a GPS satellite was decommissioned and were able to fix the problem.
Which raises the question - is there a sequel on the way?
After all, the dangers are still out there, whether it is operator error, malicious actors, or solar storms (see below), so the goal is to learn from these close calls. There will always be scares, but we can reduce the anxiety.

Happy Halloween!

Last Week's Theme: The Other AI Elephant in the Room

• Seven active projects, conferences, reviews, proposals, and technology and IP development are keeping the team busy. Lots of activity before the end of the year.
• Joined the IQT Quantum+AI "Where Timing Meets Quantum" panel. As one of the panelists noted, data centers need both "correctness and availability" of the timing signal, but "correctness" (i.e., spoofing) is the bigger concern because data centers already include some amount of holdover.

• Preparing for the International Timing and Sync Forum (ITSF) 2024 next week and a free-space quantum time transfer demonstration.
• Still on the hunt for a Photonics Lead and Software Engineer.

• GPS jamming has gotten so bad in the Nordic region that "authorities decided last month they would no longer log when and where it happens—accepting these disturbance signals as the new normal."
• A National Security Space Association navigation warfare paper noted that “GPS has been surpassed as the premier space-based PNT system in the world and is vulnerable to a variety of threats.”
• Some experts have also expressed a concern that "China’s BeiDou global navigation satellite system has the ability to imitate American GPS signals."
• The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) recently published a report, “Quantum Sensing for Position, Navigation and Timing Use Cases" that highlighted the development of quantum sensors for PNT applications.

• International Timing and Sync Forum 2024, November 4 - 7, Seville, Spain
• UK National Quantum Technologies Showcase, November 8, London, UK
• UK PNT Leadership Seminar, November 20, London, UK
• SLUSH, November 20 - 21, Helsinki, Finland
• Q2B24 Silicon Valley, December 10-12, Santa Clara, California
• Consumer Electronics Show, January 5 - 7, Las Vegas, NV
• Photonics West, January 25 - 30, San Francisco, CA
• Workshop on Synchronization and Timing Systems (WSTS), May 12 - 15, 2025, Savannah, GA
• European Navigation Conference, May 21 - 23, 2025, Wroclaw, Poland

The Halloween Solar Storm of 2003
Horror movies usually have a sequel, but in real life you want to avoid them.
Consider the tale of the Halloween Solar Storm of 2003.
Between mid-October to early November 2003, around the time of the last solar max, there were a series of solar storms.
These storms culminated in "an enormous solar flare - one of the largest ever recorded," followed by a series of powerful coronal mass ejections and geomagnetic storms.
The storms ended up impacting affected "59% of the Earth and Space science missions," disrupted GPS, satellite, TV, and radio services, "sent several deep-space missions into safe mode or complete shutdown," and destroyed the Martian Radiation Environment Experiment aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and the $640 million ADEOS-II spacecraft.
But there was a bright side, as this catastrophe led to new planning to ensure these problems would be minimized in the future. Thanks to these preventive measures, we made it through a recent solar storm of similar magnitude "without any major serious consequences."