GPS Jamming Mystery: How a Russian Satellite Disrupted Navigation

Name: Why Is It So Easy To Disrupt GPS?
Uploaded: 2026-06-05T07:09:17+00:00
Duration: 34 min 17 s
Channel: Veritasium
Description: Summary and key takeaways on Why Is It So Easy To Disrupt GPS?: Summary & Key Takeaways, covering The Discovery In early 2021 GPS monitoring stations across

Veritasium

Jun 05, 2026

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34 min video

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2 min read

YouTube video ID: tz23G_UXCGA

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In early 2021 GPS monitoring stations across Europe reported sudden, simultaneous drops in signal‑to‑noise ratios. The events clustered on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during typical business hours, and each disruption occupied a narrow 5 MHz slice centered at 1,577.5 MHz. Because the interference appeared at the same moment over a continent‑wide area, researchers concluded the source must sit at least 1,200 km above the surface; ground‑based transmitters could not overcome the Earth’s curvature. As one expert put it, “The source on the ground just wouldn't work. The curvature of the earth would block the signal over these distances.”

The Investigation

To locate the emitter, researchers collected raw voltage data from high‑resolution receivers in Amsterdam and Trondheim. By measuring microsecond‑scale arrival‑time differences, they applied time‑difference‑of‑arrival (TDOA) techniques, which generate a hyperbolic curve of possible source positions. The intersecting data narrowed the culprit to a hyperboloid surface with a margin of error of about five meters. An Algerian satellite initially suspected turned out to be another victim of the same interference, eliminating it from consideration.

The Culprit

Analysis of the narrowed‑down coordinates matched the orbit of Cosmos 2546, a Russian missile‑warning satellite that operates in a highly elliptical Molniya trajectory. Molniya orbits linger over the Northern Hemisphere, providing persistent coverage that aligns with the observed interference pattern. The jamming signal from Cosmos 2546 dwarfs standard GPS transmissions, which arrive at roughly 10⁻¹⁶ watts. “I can no longer say this is accidental with confidence,” a researcher remarked, underscoring the suspicion that the satellite may be testing a weapon or facilitating covert communication.

The Broader Context

GPS signals are intrinsically weak—comparable to “an old school light bulb two Earth diameters away”—making them vulnerable to intentional or accidental noise. The global logistics, finance, and infrastructure sectors depend on these fragile space‑based signals, creating a “wicked problem” of deep integration. The rise of GPS spoofing threatens aviation and shipping, prompting calls for resilient backups. Proposed alternatives include eLoran, a terrestrial radio navigation system; fiber‑optic networks that synchronize atomic clocks; and emerging magnetic or quantum navigation methods that do not rely on satellites.

Mechanisms Explained

GPS positioning relies on trilateration: at least four satellites broadcast timing information, allowing a receiver to solve for three spatial coordinates and a clock error. Jamming overwhelms this process by broadcasting a stronger signal in the same frequency band, drowning out the legitimate transmission. TDOA leverages the tiny differences in signal arrival times at separated receivers to pinpoint a source, while Molniya orbits achieve long dwell times over high latitudes, making them ideal for persistent coverage—or, potentially, persistent interference.

Takeaways

Simultaneous signal‑to‑noise drops in 2021 revealed a continent‑wide GPS interference that could only originate from high altitude.
Researchers used raw voltage data and TDOA to narrow the source to a five‑meter hyperboloid, ruling out ground‑based emitters.
The Russian Cosmos 2546 satellite, operating in a Molniya orbit, matches the interference pattern and emits a signal far stronger than normal GPS.
GPS’s extreme weakness—about 10⁻¹⁶ watts—makes it vulnerable to jamming, exposing a critical dependency across global logistics and finance.
Resilience strategies such as eLoran, fiber‑optic timing, and quantum navigation are being proposed to reduce reliance on satellite signals.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did researchers pinpoint Cosmos 2546 as the source of the GPS interference?

They measured microsecond arrival‑time differences between receivers in Amsterdam and Trondheim, applied TDOA to generate a hyperbolic location surface, and matched the resulting coordinates to Cosmos 2546’s Molniya orbit, confirming the satellite’s signal strength and timing aligned with the observed disruptions.

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Helpful resources related to this video

If you want to practice or explore the concepts discussed in the video, these commonly used tools may help.

Sdr Software Defined Radio Receiver Kit Recommended

Allows users to capture and analyze raw radio frequency data, helping them understand how GPS signals and interference are detected.

Amazon →

Gps Signal Jammer Detector Device

Helps users identify local interference or jamming attempts, highlighting the vulnerability of GNSS signals discussed in the podcast.

Amazon →

Book On Satellite Communications And Navigation

Provides foundational knowledge on how GNSS, orbits, and signal propagation work, expanding on the technical themes of the investigation.

Amazon →

High Precision Gnss Receiver Module

Demonstrates the hardware used for accurate positioning and timing, illustrating the sensitivity of the systems mentioned in the brief.

Amazon →

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Full Transcript YouTube

- In November 2024,
Professor Todd Humphreys,
a GPS expert at the
University of Texas at Austin,
got a mysterious tip-off.
Look at two specific days,
at exact times in a data
set collected years earlier
by a network of GPS monitoring stations.
These stations continuously record signals
from satellite navigation systems,
measuring how strong they are
relative to background noise.
It didn't seem promising.
The data was from 2021,
and it was publicly available online.
So surely if something
unusual was in there,
someone would have already found it.
But Professor Humphreys and his
student Zach Clements looked
into the data at the two
specific times suggested,
and they discovered something surprising.
At one precise moment,
receivers across the network
all reported the same thing,
a sudden drop in signal-to-noise ratio.
In effect, the navigation
signals had been overwhelmed.
The measured signal-to-noise dropped
by roughly a factor of 10.
But when they started looking
back through the data,
they found 75 days since 2019
where these strong
disruptions had taken place.
And again, and again,
the pattern was the same.
All these receivers recorded
the same drop at the same time.
- This effect was being felt
all the way across Europe,
all the way to the north,
to Svalbard, to the south,
to Spain, all the way
to Canada in the west,
as far east as eastern Poland.
And in fact,
it had a distinct pattern
across Europe to where it looked
like the blast center was in Poland
or Kaliningrad in that area.
- So, they wondered what could cause this.
At first, they thought
perhaps it's interference,
something on the ground
broadcasting a much stronger signal,
drowning out the ones
coming from the satellites,
which made Kaliningrad
an interesting candidate.
It's a heavily militarized Russian exclave
on the Baltic Sea wedged
between Poland and Lithuania.
And in recent years, it's become a hotspot
for this kind of electronic warfare.
So maybe that was it,
a side effect of the
conflict in the region.
But they realized that
explanation didn't work.
- Even the highest tower in Kaliningrad
only affects aviation
as far as, say, Denmark.
So, we had ourselves a
mystery on our hands.
We were experienced with interference
that you could call local,
something on a tower,
something on a plane
that might cover hundreds of kilometers.
But this was different.
This was continental scale.
- The researchers mapped
out all the stations
that were affected and
asked a simple question.
What kind of source could have
affected all of them at once?
The source on the ground
just wouldn't work.
The curvature of the earth
would block the signal
over these distances.
The only way to affect such
a wide area simultaneously is
from high above the earth.
And even using the most
conservative assumptions,
that the source only has
to just clear the horizon
from the perspective of every station,
the geometry shows it had to be
at least 1,200 kilometers up.
That's way higher than the
International Space Station.
So, what was causing this?
Well, there is one known
source of radio interference
from space, which is the sun.
In November 2025,
a major solar storm disrupted
GPS positioning globally
for several hours.
So, could these interference
events be caused by the sun?
There were certainly question marks.
Solar interference typically builds up
and fades over tens to
hundreds of seconds.
But these events were abrupt,
short bursts of only
three to five seconds.
Another important clue was the frequencies
that were disrupted.
Solar interference
typically spans a wide range
of radio frequencies,
whereas this interference was confined
to a very narrow slice,
just five megahertz wide,
centered at 1,577.5 megahertz.
That's right in the part of
the spectrum used by GPS.
And the final nail in the coffin
is that solar radio bursts
affect the entire sunlit
side of the earth.
But what the researchers were seeing here
was much more concentrated,
consistently centered over Europe.
So, Todd and Zach realized the only thing
that could be causing
this was a satellite,
which left them with just one question.
- Is it intentional or is it accidental?
Both my student and I looked at this
and said, unprecedented.
We've never seen this before.
The world has never seen this before.
- [Host] This satellite
seemed to be targeting GPS.
- Or rather what most of us call GPS.
That is just the shorthand.
GPS is the American system,
but there are others,
including the Russian
one, the European one,
and the Chinese one.
And your phone is actually
of these satellites to try
and tell you where you are.
These systems are known
as Global Navigation
Satellite Systems or GNSS.
And when the U.S. military
first developed the system
in the 1970s,
they wanted to prove how
well it really worked.
So, the GPS program office
set itself an ambitious goal
to use GPS to drop five bombs in a row
into the same hole from a moving plane.
- They set up a chair next to the site
that the bombs are going to be going into.
Wait, what?
If anyone doubts that
we can drop the bombs
in the same hole,
you're welcome to go and stand
right there and watch out.
(bombs blasting)
- So how does GPS work?
Well, think about what your
phone is actually trying to do
to tell you where you are.
It's listening to signals from satellites.
And those signals can tell it two things.
First, the position of
the satellite in space.
And second, the exact
time the signal was sent.
And then the receiver can compare
that to when the signal arrives.
And you can use that time difference,
multiply it by the speed of
light, and you get the distance.
So, if it took the signal 0.07 seconds,
that must mean you're around
21,000 kilometers away
from the satellite.
If you're only using a single satellite,
that puts you somewhere on
a huge sphere around it.
Now you can add a second one,
and that will narrow your position down
to this circle where the
two spheres intersect.
If you add a third,
you will narrow it down
to only two possible points.
And only one of these is
actually on Earth's surface.
So, you might think three
satellites is all you need.
We have three equations,
one for each satellite,
and three unknowns that are
my position, x, y, and z.
So, on the left side, I
have the geometric distance
between me and each of
the three satellites.
And on the right side, I have
the measured signal time,
all multiplied by the speed of light.
Now, satellites have atomic clocks,
so their timing drifts
by only three seconds every million years.
But my phone does not
contain an atomic clock,
so its clock can drift
by that much in just a couple of days.
And a timing error of just
100 nanoseconds throws off
your position by 30 meters.
So, in reality, each
distance is slightly wrong,
which means the position you
calculate is slightly off too.
So now, instead of just
solving for position,
I also have to solve for the clock error.
So, let's call that b.
But now I have three
equations and four unknowns,
which is unsolvable.
So, I can fix that by
adding a fourth equation
or a fourth satellite.
Four equations, four unknowns,
that makes the system solvable.
Okay, but we've made one key assumption,
that when I'm calculating my position,
I know where the satellite is.
And sure, it can tell me where it is,
but its position around the Earth
and its speed are constantly changing.
So how does the satellite actually know
where it is in the first place?
- The GPS satellites need
to be told where they are,
and they're told where they
are with ground stations
that monitor them.
And the ground stations have to know
where they are to tell the
satellites where they are.
- [Gregor] But the Earth
itself is constantly shifting
as the continents move.
- So, how do we work out
where the ground stations are?
You work out using quasars
where the ground stations are.
- [Gregor] Because they're
billions of light years away,
quasars appear almost perfectly
fixed in the night sky,
which means we can use
them as reference points,
much like early explorers
navigating by the stars.
A small fraction
of quasars are extremely
bright radio sources.
When those radio waves reach Earth,
telescopes around the world detect them
at slightly different times.
From those tiny differences
in arrival time,
you can precisely determine
the relative position
of the telescopes.
And by making lots of those
measurements over time,
you can build a precise map
of how the Earth itself
moves, continents included.
GPS ground stations are
tied into that same map.
- [Ramsey] The ground
stations tell the satellites
where they are,
and then that's how you
work out where you are.
(Gregor chuckles)
- You just blew my mind.
- So, we're always navigating
by the stars, just via GPS.
- And in reality, your
phone isn't connected
to just four satellites.
It's usually far more than that.
Mine right now is using,
it's like over 20 satellites.
That's because the
system is doing much more
than just solving for four equations.
Say you're on this little street in Paris
and you open maps and you try
to figure out where you are.
Turns out there are a lot of
things that can throw this off.
There's the relatively simple ones,
like taking into account
special and general relativity.
If you didn't correct for that,
your position would drift
about 11 kilometers per day,
and you can be anywhere
within this entire area.
So, the satellites are
constantly being monitored
and updated, and they send
down timing corrections
that your phone applies in real time.
Now, on top of that, in the fraction
of a second that it takes
for the signal to reach you,
the Earth has actually rotated slightly.
So, when your phone
figures out where you are,
it also has to account for
the fact where Paris was
when the signal was sent,
not where it is now.
If you don't correct for that,
that adds about 20 meters
of error, enough that you're
not even on the same block.
And of course, the signal
has to pass through Earth's atmosphere.
Now, the ionosphere will add
between 5 and 15 meters
of error to your position,
and the lower levels of the
atmosphere, with weather
and pressure and humidity,
will add another meter or two.
So, if you don't account for that,
you'll still be on the
wrong side of the street.
And that's where the extra
satellites come in handy.
They give your phone extra
measurements to separate out
the errors and give you a
better fix of your position.
So ultimately, it can be
accurate down to 3 to 5 meters,
which is pretty incredible if you think
about what it takes to solve this.
And with the most advanced GNSS tech,
you can push this even
further to a few centimeters.
But at this point, you actually
have to start accounting
for stuff like how
gravity bends space-time
and delays the signal.
But all of this only works
if you're actually able
to hear those signals.
- [Ramsey] When the
signal arrives from space,
it's traveled 20,000
kilometers to get here,
and it was only transmitted
with about 50 watts of power.
So, it's like an old school light bulb
two Earth diameters away.
- [Gregor] And because
that power spreads out
over such a vast distance,
the received GPS signal at your
phone is only about a tenth
of a quadrillionth of a watt,
or 10 to the negative 16 watts.
- It's insanely quiet.
- Which means it doesn't
take much to drown it out.
If you broadcast enough
noise at the same frequency,
you can overwhelm the signal until
it becomes indistinguishable
from the background.
This is called jamming.
And a lot of these navigation systems use
the radio spectrum, roughly
between 1.1 and 1.6 gigahertz.
Lower frequencies travel
well through the atmosphere,
but they require much larger antennas.
Higher frequencies allow
for smaller antennas,
but the signals are much
more easily absorbed
and scattered, especially in bad weather.
So, this band is a kind of sweet spot
that navigation systems rely on.
Which means if something
interferes with it,
it can affect multiple systems at once.
That's why this part of a
spectrum is tightly protected.
Nothing else is supposed
to be transmitting here.
And deliberately interfering
with these signals is
illegal in most countries,
but something was.
Something powerful enough
to overwhelm satellite navigation across
an entire continent.
Which brings us back to the question
facing Professor Todd Humphreys.
Was this accidental?
Or was someone flooding
this band on purpose?
- It's, you know, a mystery novel here
where you're trying to figure
out whether it was the butler
in the kitchen with the crowbar, right?
And we have to put all
of the clues together.
If it had been random,
occurring because of some
failure in a satellite,
maybe some amplifier gets
too hot and misbehaves,
then you'd expect it to happen
equally likely on a Monday
and a Friday, right?
- [Host] But when they
went back through the data,
something strange emerged.
The interference events were
happening mostly on Tuesdays,
Wednesdays and Thursdays during
business hours in Europe.
- So, tell me, tell me
what amplifier tends
to fail during business hours
in Europe on Wednesdays.
- So now we know this
probably isn't random.
There's likely human input.
But that doesn't necessarily mean
it's intentional or malicious.
So, the hunt was on to track
down the actual source.
But that turned out to be
harder than you might think.
Because there were still so many unknowns.
In situations like this,
uncertainty can quickly turn
into competing narratives.
We've seen it before.
When the EU chief's
plane was allegedly hit
by GPS interference last year,
over 150 news outlets reported on it.
But depending on where you saw the story,
your perception could
be completely different.
If you saw Le Monde first,
you might have come away thinking
it might be Russia's fault.
If you saw Newsweek first,
you would definitely think it was Russia.
And if you saw this headline, well,
you might question the veracity
of the story altogether.
Three headlines, three
entirely different conclusions.
That's why we use today's
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Let's go back to that
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Below that, you can see that coverage was
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And now, back to the hunt for the source.
- To do this, we have to set up a kind
of elaborate estimation problem,
but there are many unknowns.
- A jammer works by
broadcasting a stronger signal
in the same frequency band.
It's kind of like yelling
over someone whispering.
So, if this were a jammer on the ground,
you could track it down by
looking at signal strength.
The closer you are, the
stronger the signal will get.
But once you're dealing
with something in space,
that intuition breaks down.
To work backwards from signal strength,
you'd need to know how much power
the satellite was transmitting,
and the exact shape and
direction of its beam.
Even how each receiver's antenna responds
to signals arriving from different angles.
And at 1,200 kilometers above the Earth,
very different satellite
positions can produce
almost identical patterns on the ground.
So instead of trying to pinpoint
the transmitter directly,
the researchers used a simpler filter.
If a satellite caused
interference at all these stations
at the same time, then it had to be
above the horizon for all of them at once.
Right now, there are over 15,000
active satellites in orbit.
But that one constraint lets
you eliminate over 98% of them.
That still leaves around
200 possibilities.
What's left are satellites
in very high orbits,
many of them in or near
the geostationary belt,
where they move at the same
rate as the Earth rotates,
so they stay fixed over one point.
From about 36,000 kilometers up,
a single one can see a huge
portion of the Earth at once.
However, if the same satellite
caused multiple events on different days,
then it has to satisfy that
condition every single time,
which narrows it down to
just 14 possible suspects.
- So, what kind of satellites
and countries were in these 14?
- Well, there were several
interesting candidates.
One was a satellite operated by Algeria,
and it even had, on public documentation,
a transmitter in the same frequency band
we were seeing interference on.
- So, they took a closer
look, and on paper it fit.
It was visible to all of
the reference stations,
and it could transmit in exactly
the band they were seeing.
This looked like it could be the answer.
But they had a nagging doubt that some
of the most distant stations in Svalbard
and western Greenland,
this satellite was
barely above the horizon,
which meant if it was the source,
the signal would have to be
skimming across the Earth
and just barely glancing into the antenna
of these receivers.
Now, that's not impossible.
Low angle signals can be picked up,
but the more researchers looked,
the less certain they
became that this satellite
was actually the source.
So, they examined data from GNSS receivers
that were tracking this satellite
during the interference events.
- It looked just like all of
the other ordinary GPS signals
that were getting hammered
by this interference.
So, the ratio of the signal power
to the background noise also dropped
and dropped in the same proportion that
the other GPS signals were
dropping at the same time.
This was not the attacker.
This was just another
legitimate signal in the L band
that had been interfered with.
- The Algerian satellite
wasn't the source.
It was another victim.
But what about the other 13?
Any one of them could have been visible
to all the stations at once.
So geometrically, they
could all be the culprit.
But that's where the
trail started to go cold.
I mean, none of them had clear
public documentation showing
they could transmit and
jam the right frequencies.
And some of them had barely
any public information at all.
- We couldn't narrow it down further
because of all of these things
we didn't know about the
signals they were broadcasting,
how intense they were,
what their pattern was.
So, there we were stuck
for about four months.
- And there was an even
more fundamental problem.
Everything they'd done so
far relied on one idea,
that all of these interference
events were coming
from a single satellite.
- It was under a really
controversial assumption.
Controversial in that my student
and I just couldn't come to
fully embrace this assumption.
If we broke our assumption,
then that would relieve
the focus on geostationary satellites.
Then we could open up the
focus on many other satellites.
But now instead of 13
remaining on our list,
it would expand to, you know,
maybe 100 or more satellites.
- And suddenly, instead of
closing in on an answer,
it felt like they were back at square one.
So, they needed a completely
different approach.
All the data they had
was from GNSS receivers
that process everything internally.
They lock onto satellites,
track signal strength,
and then output a clean
simplified measurement,
how strong that signal is
compared to the background noise.
And they do that just once per second.
But these interference
bursts only lasted three to five seconds,
which means each event is captured
in just a handful of samples.
You can see that the signal dropped,
but not precisely when it dropped.
Not with enough timing resolution
to compare one receiver
to another, to see
which one was hit first,
or how the interference
moved across the network.
What they needed was the
raw radio signal itself.
So, they started designing
specialized receivers
that could capture the data
in much higher temporal resolution.
The plan was to deploy
them all across Europe.
But building them, installing them,
and waiting for new events
to happen would take months,
maybe years.
So, in September 2025,
they took their investigation public
at the Institute of Navigation
Conference in Baltimore.
And the response was immediate.
The room was packed.
Everyone wanted to know the same thing.
What was this satellite
and who was responsible?
- Honestly, it was one
of the most fun meetings
I've been part of.
It was almost like we
had been brought together
for a big brainstorming session to see
if we could crack this
problem as a community
that my student and I had
not been able to crack
by ourselves.
- [Host] The question of a
mystery satellite propagated
throughout the research community.
The German Aerospace Center came up
with an ambitious plan to
take a large tracking dish,
point it at candidate satellites,
and try to catch the
interference in real time.
- But remember, we're trying
to catch a needle in a haystack
that only shows up over a short interval
and only happens once,
maybe once or twice a month.
- [Host] They tracked satellite
after satellite and nothing.
No signal, no anomaly, no breakthrough.
Yet again, the trail went cold.
Weeks passed, then months,
until an email arrived.
- I looked at the email
and then I had to reread it
because it was almost
like it had come right out
of my dreams.
You know, this can't possibly be true.
He had beautiful raw data
from two different stations.
- At last, they had what
they'd been missing,
the raw radio signal itself.
Samples of the raw voltage
off the antenna capturing
the actual digitized radio waves millions
of times per second from two stations,
one in Amsterdam in the Netherlands
and one in Trondheim in Northern Norway.
They captured these interference events
on February 11th, 2026.
And now, rather than asking
how strong is the signal,
they could ask, when did it arrive?
With this raw data,
they isolated a 2.3 second window where
both stations recorded the same event.
And because they were
sampling at tens of megahertz,
they could align the two
data sets to pinpoint
the exact moment the
jamming signal arrived
at both stations.
This meant they could
measure the tiny difference
in when the signal reached each station.
Imagine the signal
reaches Trondheim roughly
139 microseconds before
it reaches Amsterdam.
Well, that tells you that the
source must be slightly closer
to Trondheim than it is to Amsterdam.
And that constraint gives you a shape,
a curve in space of all
the possible locations
of the source where that
exact timing difference
would be observed.
In three dimensions, that
becomes a kind of warped surface,
a hyperboloid.
Whatever transmitted the
signal had to lie somewhere
on that surface.
And because the raw data was
so incredibly high resolution,
the margin of error, the
thickness of that shape,
stretching tens of thousands
of kilometers into space,
was only about five meters.
- And because we were so
interested in avoiding errors,
we just determined that
we were not going to talk
to each other for a week.
We would do our separate thing for a week.
And then we would come back
together, compare notes,
and we would hopefully have
not made the same mistakes.
And I presented my findings to Zach
and he presented his to me
and they were not the same.
And I have to admit that
because I'm the professor,
I was pretty much insistent
that my finding was correct.
But then he pointed out
a couple of other things,
other checks that he'd run.
And then I realized that
I had an error in my code.
And once I fixed that error,
I ended up getting exactly
the same time difference
of arrival that he did.
- And now they had a way to
test every possible satellite,
not just the 14 from
their earlier predictions.
For each satellite, they
took its known orbit
and asked if the signal came from here,
what timing difference would we expect
between Amsterdam and Trondheim?
Then they compared that
prediction to the real data.
If it didn't match, the
satellite was ruled out.
And since they had a continuous two
and a half second recording,
they could take this a step further.
As the satellite moved,
that hyperboloid would shift
slightly through space.
So, the real source had to stay aligned
with it the entire time,
which made this test incredibly strict.
- And only one satellite was anywhere near
this time difference
of arrival measurement.
And in fact, it wasn't
just near, it was dead on.
- The only possible culprit
was a Russian satellite, Cosmos 2546.
It remained perfectly on the hyperboloid,
aligning with their data
to within 200 meters,
which is well within the uncertainty
of the satellite's publicly
available orbital data.
Now it's worth saying here,
this work is still new
and it hasn't undergone peer
review, but independent teams
in Europe have verified
aspects of these findings.
There was only one slight issue.
Cosmos 2546 was launched
on the 22nd of May, 2020.
So, it couldn't explain
events going back to 2019.
But then they discovered
that Cosmos 2546 is part
of a constellation of six satellites.
This constellation is part
of Russia's early missile warning system.
- It's basically part
of their Golden Dome.
If you've heard of the U.S. Golden Dome,
this is part of the sensory apparatus
for the Russian missile detection system.
- They sit in what's
called a Molniya orbit.
A highly elliptical path
that carries them high
over the Northern hemisphere,
where they can slow down and linger.
It's the way that high
latitude countries like Russia
can get the benefits of something
like geostationary orbit
across multiple satellites.
But this also means this
constellation covers large parts
of the globe.
So, they have the capability
to jam GNSS across a far
wider region than we've seen,
including over the United States.
The pattern already told
us this wasn't random.
The frequency told us it wasn't natural.
And now we know it's coming
from a military system in orbit.
But intention, well,
that's harder to prove.
- What is already being
broadcast is enormously powerful.
It's like hundreds of
times more powerful than
the GPS signals themselves.
- But it's slightly offset
from the GPS frequency,
which seems odd.
Because surely if you
want to jam GPS properly,
you would put your jamming
signal directly on top of it.
Well, Todd actually has
a theory about this.
- If you're going to test this capability,
then you test it in the neighborhood
of the signal you intend to jam,
but not right on that signal.
And you test it only briefly just
to make sure everything's still working.
And then in the eventual future,
where there is a hot
conflict, they go ahead
and tune their transmitter
down to the GPS band.
But it's much more damaging
now that it lies right
on that band.
- [Derek] So, one possibility is this.
What we've been seeing are tests,
a system being exercised
without fully revealing what it can do.
And while just a theory at this point,
there is another hint
this might be the case.
The raw data also revealed a
second interference burst aimed
at a lower frequency, 1,558.5 megahertz,
which overlaps with signals
from the Chinese BeiDou navigation system.
- I'll say it in the most
conservative way possible.
I can no longer say this is
accidental with confidence.
I'm leaning toward this
being a periodic test
of a capability that
would be very damaging
if it was deployed in anger.
- [Derek] But when we spoke to a team
that had independently traced
the signals back to satellites
in Russia's missile warning
system, they had another idea.
- So that'd be very odd behavior
to be continually testing something.
So, our alternative theory
is that those might actually
be very short, very brief,
very specific comms messages
coming from those satellites.
- [Derek] And if that were
true, transmitting messages
on these frequencies would provide a layer
of protection because the
enemy wouldn't want to jam
them and risk disrupting
their own navigation systems.
- I'm not saying it's not the jamming.
That's still a very strong possibility.
I think the point is
there are some odd things
about that and there is clearly here
an alternative explanation.
- But whether these signals
were covert messages
or tests of a space-based jamming system,
the events themselves
were incredibly brief.
And that might explain something else.
Why this went unnoticed for years.
But if this system were
ever fully switched on,
the impact could be enormous.
When we see maps of massive
GPS interference today,
you are almost entirely looking at reports
from commercial aircraft
affected by ground-based jammers.
Typical airliners cruise
at altitudes between 30,000
and 42,000 feet, which is high enough
to remain in direct line of sight
of jamming signals across vast distances.
But at ground level, buildings
and terrain shield much
of our infrastructure
from that interference.
- But everything is line
of sight from space, yeah.
It's an invisible utility
that supports virtually every technology.
And it's essential to the
way we live every day.
The United States made
GPS its gift to the world.
And clever engineers took this free thing
that works really well and very precisely
and incorporated it into
all kinds of systems.
It's one of those wicked problems.
You really don't know what
all the dependencies are
and where all the interconnections are
because it's just proliferated
throughout the world.
- [Derek] Global satellite
navigation systems
underpin aviation and global shipping.
It synchronizes financial systems,
keeps cell towers on time.
It is crucial for logistics networks,
ride hailing apps, delivery
systems, even dating apps.
A disruption of these systems
across an area as large
as what these satellites are capable
of could affect hundreds
of millions of people.
- It would send shockwaves
of fear through the world,
not just through Europe,
because an entirely new weapon
from space would have been revealed.
And people would know that at
any time of their choosing,
Russia could deploy
this over their country
or over their continent.
I do think that this
is a massive escalation
in the electronic warfare
background conflict
that's going on right now.
- [Derek] Now, this sounds
scary, but the truth
is we should have been worried
about this fragile system already.
- The threat has always been there.
Severe solar events could
ionize the atmosphere
and keep all kinds of signals
from space from coming in,
or it could destroy satellites.
We could have a version
of the Kessler effect
in medium Earth orbit,
and satellites be destroyed by debris.
So, everybody should have
already been concerned.
They should continue to be concerned.
And this is just another example of why.
- [Derek] But the good news is,
we already know exactly
how to fix the problem.
It involves building a future system
that doesn't rely entirely
on weak satellite signals.
- We suggest that a resilient
national PNT architecture
would be signals from space,
terrestrial broadcast,
and fiber, because those are
three completely different
phenomenologies in a vector
that would impact one,
would not impact the other two.
- Some countries are already doing this.
Places like South Korea, China,
and the UK are building
out backup networks
that don't rely on signals from space.
They're using fiber optic
cables to securely share time
from atomic clocks here on Earth.
And for navigation, they're
turning to systems like eLoran,
huge high-powered radio towers
that are much harder to overwhelm.
Other solutions are even
being developed using magnetic
and quantum systems that
use subtle variations
in the Earth's magnetic
field to work out position.
So, you don't need any external signals.
But despite all of this, most countries,
including the United States,
still remain highly dependent on GPS
and other satellite navigation systems.
In this video, we've been
talking about jamming,
but there's another kind
of GNSS interference,
one that swaps your real
signal for a fake one,
quietly feeding you a location
that looks completely real.
So, if you trust it,
it can guide you somewhere else entirely.
This is known as GPS spoofing.
It's affecting over 1,500 flights per day.
And at sea, we're seeing the same thing.
Ships are jumping implausible distances,
briefly disappearing or reappearing
in impossible locations, even on land.
It's a systematic, geographically
clustered distortion
of reality, both in the air and at sea.
If you wanna know more about that,
let us know in the comments.
This story was based on research
by Professor Todd
Humphreys and his student,
Zach Clements, at the
University of Texas at Austin.
There's a link to their work
down in the description.
I wanna thank them for all their help
and for sharing their findings with us.
And of course, I wanna
thank you for watching.
(upbeat music fades)

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