This is the most obvious practical application of my PhD topic. A Bose Einstein Condensate is an extremely sensitive detector of gravity- a nuclear submarine could use it to make an ultra-accurate map of the world based on variations in the gravitational constant g. This would remove one of the primary reasons subs need to surface , in order to GPS lock.
It’s a naval chart that would not require surfacing.
A French postdoc in my lab swore this was the moneymaker for our entire subfield, and it seems he was on to something …
> one of the primary reasons subs need to surface , in order to GPS lock
While getting a GPS position is helpful, the primary reason a submarine goes to periscope depth regularly is for communications. The Navy needs to send information to submarines and know that they'll get it and take action within a certain timeframe. That's by far the primary driver.
From layman to former submariner, a very silly question I've always wondered about and that I now have the rare chance to ask someone with some expertise: Do submarines mostly roam about or do they tend to stay relatively quiet/idle? I always imagined submarines constantly moving about but at the same time it feels like a waste of fuel.
Ohio-class submarines (the ones that carry missiles): when they're "on station" they're just tooling around staying as quiet as they can. There's a relevant phrase for them: "Three knots to nowhere"
Los Angeles and Virginia-class submarines are always doing something: doing exercises, transiting from one location to another, etc. And typically multiple things at once. While the boat is transiting from an exercise area to homeport, the team is doing engineering drills, or other kinds of training. Or the forward part of the boat is doing exercises with a carrier battle group while the engineering team is doing engineering drills. (There's ALWAYS engineering drills or maintenance happening.)
Fuel isn't a primary concern: a nuclear reactor is fueled for the life of the boat, so 30-ish years. That said, effective life of a reactor is something the Navy tracks closely, and depending on the life of the boat, the life left in the reactor, some boats are decommissioned as they get close to the end of their fuel life, and others get re-fueled. (And in the case of the USS San Francisco, who had recently been refueled before it hit an underwater mountain, they cut off the front half of the submarine and welded the front half of a recently-decommissioned submarine on, because the reactor and fuel was too valuable to go to waste)
French (& American and Royal Navy) submarines are nuclear powered. No fuel necessary.
They do have measures of "nuclear fuel" remaining, but it lasts about 30 years (at least in the American boats) so generally doesn't impact day-to-day considerations.
While I'm 100% positive the details of operational concerns like this are classified, there are 2 distinct types of submarines today with 2 different objectives:
1) Attack Submarines (e.g. Los Angeles-class & Virginia-class for USN) which usually roam within a designated operations area, surveilling, tracking, and generally keeping tabs on other nations' surface & sub-surface fleet dispositions. These subs typically have multi-week sorties and may intermittently surface for surveillance & comms.
2) Ballistic Missile Submarines aka "Boomers" (e.g. Ohio-class for USN) which are given a strategic area in which to operate and their objective is to remain silent & undetected, waiting for the hopefully-never-coming order to launch their SLBMs. These subs usually have multi-month sorties and often don't surface until the end of their patrol.
Clearly the Ballistic Missile Submarines surfaces intermittently surface
for comms as well?
If not, they won't know when to set off their missiles making then not
very useful as a deterrent
I have often wondered how close to the surface they need to get.
I would presume retractable antennas could be extended from a sub
from a non-trivial depth.
Or cable attached to buoys
Or something much smarter that I have not thought about yet.
There's a couple of different "wake up" signals that can reach deeper into water. Their biggest limitation is very low bandwidth, so an attack sub will emerge (/send up a buoy on a tether) to get an updated tactical map.
Also highlighting the E-6B Mercury (and the upcoming EC-130J), which among other communication options has a 5-mile (!) VLF antenna it deploys vertically in midair (!!) to establish limited-bandwidth communications with submarines.
Yes, modern subs typically carry comms buoys. Some are tethered and allow for two-way communication. Others are transmit only and float up to the surface independently.
But there are VLF antennas that Ohio-class submarines have to receive low-data-rate comms while submerged.
Any reasonable communications have to be made while at periscope depth. (Which is subtly different than "having to surface"... at PD just the thin mast is out of the water.)
A submarine itself is quite massive, and has big moving parts (e.g. the rotor). The crew has less mass, but it would be very close, and also in constant movement. Wouldn’t this interfere with those measurements? Would they need to stop the engine and play “frozen TikTok” while the measurement device is active?
Surely the influence of some of these sources of noise can be modeled and filtered out. A University of Vienna currently conducts experiments to measure the gravitational force at very small sales, and they already have to do this with things like crowds moving about the city during rush hours.
I think you may be engaged in circular reasoning, here. Noise, by definition, is what can’t be modeled. The idea would be to have some model of the signal produced by the submarine’s machinery, and use that to reduce the noise (increase SNR) to the point that this nav system becomes useful.
Of course we would always filter out noise completely if it was that easy to model. My point was that some components of that noise (for example the moving parts of the engines) can be modeled very accurately.
Not a formal definition, but noise is simply the undesirable parts of the output of any information processing device, be it a sensor, an amplifier, or a transmission medium. But on Earth it's simply not practical as such. Gravitational waves observatories are used to detect events such as neutron star or black hole mergers that are otherwise unobservable, but they require an insane level of precision to be detected.
> LISA would be the first dedicated space-based gravitational-wave observatory. It aims to measure gravitational waves directly by using laser interferometry. The LISA concept has a constellation of three spacecraft arranged in an equilateral triangle with sides 2.5 million kilometres long, flying along an Earth-like heliocentric orbit. The distance between the satellites is precisely monitored to detect a passing gravitational wave.[2]
It also says the ESA LISA projected launch date is in year 2037.
Could 3 or 4 cubesats per cluster solve for space-based gravitational wave observation?
Could the gravitational wave sensors be mounted on Starlink or OneWeb ULEO Ultra Low Earth Orbit satellites with a 5 year lifecycle? (Also, how sealed and shielded do consumer radio telescopes like Unistellar's eVscope and eQuinox need to be to last a few years in microgravity? Maybe mando blackout noise.)
What is SOTA State of the Art in is it "matter-wave interferometry"?
> Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave.
It sure is a medium! One Denver (IIRC) gravitational experiment could measure the field distortion caused by 100,000 people and cars at a local sports arena. [citation needed]
Is there a butterfly effect -like minimum pertubation for gravitational wave propagation through matter or massful things, at least?
Is there something that's low-enough power to not EM-burn a brainstem in a crytographically-keyed medical device with key revocation?
Does a fishing lure bobber on the water produce gravitational waves as part of the n-body gravitational wave fluid field, and how separable are the source wave components with e.g. Quantum Fourier Transform/or and other methods?
It'd be interesting to see if they're sensitive enough to do the opposite detect the gravity anomaly that is the sub. There's a couple near future submarine warfare books where that's one of the devices used to attempt to find subs.
Gravity force is proportional to mass and the average density of submarine is close to water density so (possibly slightly less as positive bouyancy is preferable for safety reasons) so gravity force produced by submarine should be very close to the equivalent volume of water. So instead of detecting big chunk of metal (which is still relatively small for the scale of gravity), sensor would have to be sensitive enough to detect mass distribution within submarine or the minor density difference due to slight positive bouyancy.
I love when HN commenters get out of water on topics. The GRACE retreivals to reconstruct mass changes for "mascons" that are several hundred kilometers in width\height take a month of static overpasses and incredible mathematics and signal processing. There is absolutely no way that their data could be used to locate a submarines, ever.
The main one I've read is Joe Buff's Deep Sound Channel series, found it after a recommendation from someone else on HN even so glad to continue the chain. Fell off it a bit in book 4 but that might have been me burning out on them, I ripped through the first 3 and focused too hard on them.
The majority of INS platform drift is from a thing called "tilt error" - where the IRS initially misjudges the exact direction of the gravitational vector during alignment. All this will do is improve the accuracy of the accelerometers but will still have the drift caused in the INS itself. How will this make such a large improvement over what we have already?
Let's use a magnetometer as an example. Inertial navigation system (INS) is just using the magnetometer as a compass, so errors in bearing accumulate over time. Instead, if you built a map of magnetic field strength, the slight spatial variation of field strength would let you precisely localize on the map.
In robotics parlance, this is the difference between dead reckoning versus SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping).
Traditional dead reckoning is reasonably accurate over moderate timescales in the mostly empty ocean as subs are big/stable and relatively slow. Thus the existing approach of only occasionally surfacing for GPS. This is therefore more a supplement as being able to regularly recenter even a few times a day is good enough.
The earths magnetic field is not constant. I don't know how much it changes, but I know magnetic north drifts a bit every year. And every once in a while the field reverses (IIRC we are like 10k years overdue for a reversal if we read the history of them right - a lot of guesses go into that of cousre)
There’s nothing saying that you can’t do a re-localization or remapping path with basically infinite frequency, or any frequency that we know that there is variance around. At a minimum then, it becomes a better standard for which other things can bear on.
I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't useful for practical purposes. That is what the article is about. I just meant to point out that there are limits and disadvantages to work around. I'm expecting to make this useful they will have to have a team to constantly remap the earth, and send those updates to whoever needs the information.
The accuracy of the reading determines the error. If today's error is so large that you have to resurface for GPS several times a day to reset it, maybe this can lower that error so you only have to resurface several times a month.
A long, long time ago I used to work as a technician in a shop that aligned INS for aircraft (although I didn't work on them myself). I think what the OP is referring to is that during the alignment process, the assumption is that the acceleration due to gravity is always perpendicular to the INS gimbal frame. So if there are any errors in the INS leveling during alignment, they can cause errors in the INS calibration. I assume this is what the OP means by "tilt error" (although this is the first time hearing of the term). These errors then get compounded during use. You can look up INS alignment processes for more information.
> It’s a naval chart that would not require surfacing.
Other sources say this is about inertial navigation, not based on charts.
"Accelerometers measure how an object’s velocity changes over time. With this, and the starting point of the object, the new position can be calculated."
There isn't any inherent difference (indeed, you can do some coarse gravity surveys by basically watching the drift of an IMU relative to GPS), but there's a pretty big difference in terms of the parameters of your sensor. Most gravimeters don't make for good accelerometers and vice-versa. One of the biggest reasons being dynamic range: most gravimeters are only able to sense a very small range around 1g, which means they quickly saturate when there's any significant motion. I don't know if that's something which these quantum sensors can work around, however. (Also, you need a gyro good enough to go along with those accelerometers, which may still be a challenge)
What would you do with the g measurement to get your location? Can g deltas be matched to sea floor contour maps? Otherwise it seems like subs would have to be following g-mapped routes.
With a highly detailed map, it becomes a statistical fitting problem, to locate yourself based on an estimate of position history using intertidal measurements and your time history of gravitational measurements, starting from an initial position estimate. I would imagine this could be quite accurate.
A typical sub drifts by only a few tens of meters per day - obviously this builds up . The point of the BEC gravity map is to reduce this inaccuracy an order of magnitude, thereby extending the subsurface range of the subs.
By having a base map of the gravity of the ocean floor. Picture a contour map, but for values of g.
Same as if you were navigating based on a physical contour map of the ocean floor, except that getting an accurate depth like that in deep waters isn’t possible, and in shallow waters requires sonar.
I'd assume features below the sea floor have a much bigger impact than surface features. Large iron deposits, volcanic activity, natural gas deposits, whatever the LLSVPs are, etc. But you could use ships to correlate gravity measurements with GPS locations and make an accurate map that way. You don't need to map the entire ocean, just enough locations to allow subs to occasionally recalibrate their position.
Do we somehow already have that super-accurate "map of g"? Wouldn't one already have to exist to be able to use quantum navigation? Moreover, would it not also require integration with a gyro and a lot of history to be able to know, for instance, which place it's at of many in any given ocean where g = 9.8100023?
Does g really vary that much that you can figure out where you are with it with sufficient accuracy to do military stuff?
Yes, and yes. We've had the gravity maps for about a decade now, and the tech for recovering the location given such data was mastered in the late 80s, but no way to make accurate enough measurements while at sea until now.
I am a ham radio operator and was thinking about novel forms of signal propagation.
I landed on the idea of gravitons. Could gravitonic signal propagation be done somehow? While researching, I keep coming across familiar terms I know from radio land.
Just curious if the fields here could be harnessed for communication. Thanks.
The big big downside of gravity waves is that they have no dipole radiators - with electric charge you have + and - and that allows very efficient propagation. For gravity there is only one charge ,and this allows only quadrupole radiation - making it extremely awful for transmission.
Yes, but there is no dispersion relation or absorption by the interstellar medium (not directly related to the quadrupole nature, but that which makes a radiation hard to detect also makes it hard to interfere with).
The detectors are such precision instruments it took over 10 years of calibration until they even had the first detection. Maybe some far off comms network could use them, but I doubt anytime soon. I wonder if you could use erasure codes with them too :)
Gravity waves are way too hard to detect and generate to be used for communication. The waves we can just barely detect too 8 solar masses worth of energy to generate.
Remember that that 8 solar mass gravity wave source is potentially 100’s millions of light years away. A sci-fi author could conjure up a ‘portable box’ containing a couple of orbiting micro-scopic black holes in a box to generate gravity wave signals someone somewhere in the solar system could pick up with a portable LIGO device. Consider this comment a patent on the idea :-)
> What do you mean? What would be the source of the regular wave-like signal
The source of the signal would be a solar system that contains planets in a stable enough orbit to harbor life.
> and why only systems with life have one?
Solar systems that harbor life (our own, for example) are not the only stable solar systems. A stable solar system is however required to be the genesis grounds of life as we understand it, otherwise the building blocks of such potential life would be swallowed in the chaos and heat.
How does stability lead to a wave? We can see wobble in stars to know they are getting tugged by planets. Are you expecting similar with gravity?
I'm not a physicist nor astronomer. I wouldn't expect any gravity waves as I'd expect the star system to have a center of mass that stays in roughly the same space.
Yeah, and if you put one in some kind of "spy balloon" you could also use it to map secret underground structures that may or may not exist in certain parts of the US ;)
> This would remove one of the primary reasons subs need to surface , in order to GPS lock.
Huh? Wouldn't it be enough to send some small thing connected by thin wires or wirelessly to the submarine (lasers, ultrasound, whatever) that could aquire location and communicate it? Given military budgets it could probably even be disposable.
Leaving beacons in areas of interest also seems like a good idea. With good encryption their signal could be indistinguishable from noise happening around it.
Both these things are probably already being done to some extent. Submarine broadcast stations for navigation were definitely talked about a lot. Note that military submarines is a secretive field, so you ever know only so much.
You don't want to send out beacons like that from your nuclear sub. Your adversaries can detect those, which negates the purpose of having a nuclear sub in the first place.
Additionally if they communicate through radio, you're back to the same problem because it's the thousand feet of water that blocks most radio waves. If they communicate via ultrasound you've just tied your sub to a nearby active sonar source. If they communicate via laser you have to be very close otherwise the power of the laser creates sonar detectable variations in the water near the sub.
> Wouldn't it be enough to send some small thing connected by thin wires or wirelessly to the submarine (lasers, ultrasound, whatever) that could aquire location and communicate it?
They do, using either tethered buoys or 'buoyant cable antennas' (the cable is the antenna and is itself buoyant) They can use these without coming to periscope depth, or even slowing down.
> A Bose Einstein Condensate is an extremely sensitive detector of gravity- a nuclear submarine could use it to make an ultra-accurate map of the world based on variations in the gravitational constant g
it would seem the Total Perspective Vortex has obvious military applications
I would imagine that there is is an insane amount of gravitational noise from things like the planet’s asymmetry and events occurring all the way from the core to the crust, the ocean… to cut through that noise you need one big thumper.
Thing is, you don't have to cut through the noise these days. Low energy/low bandwidth radio communication routinely sends messages below the noise floor.
Depends on you application, but if you only send some bits of information ("stocks just crashed") having a big thumper with a very known impact profile is sufficient.
For the most part yes, but for market arbitrage, the milliseconds saved by communicating thru the planet might be worth figuring out how to oscillate an extremely large weight very rapidly.
"Closeness to space" doesn't affect the gravitational force due to a particular piece of matter. Now, if water was as dense as rock, then undersea mountains wouldn't make such a difference to the gravitational field.
I'm trying to understand why you think "closeness to space" would be a factor. Maybe you are thinking that the seabed is going to be further from a detector than the terrain would be?
It is true that the further from the Earth the detector is, the smaller the anomaly will be.
The magma is not exactly a liquid. Neither is it homogeneous - the roots of the components of continental plates extend down hundreds of kilometers into the mantle. It is also possible to seismologically trace the remains of ancient continental plates which have otherwise all but disappeared from the crust.
There might be some confusion in these replies related to the gp's mixture of two terms. g = gravity of the earth which varies and the gravitational constant G which is a Constant and the same across the universe.
Yes it does but we also have satellites mapping those shifts so it could be accounted for. The big question is are those fine grained enough to resolve the errors in modern INSs.
Wouldn't that then require communication with those satellites to receive the shift/drift info? Doesn't that eradicate the point of a navigational system without reliance on GPS/satellites?
Or is the drift is so minor that this quantum navigation system can operate for up to 6 months without sufficient core drift alignment calculation?
"n condensed matter physics, a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter that is typically formed when a gas of bosons at very low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (−273.15 °C or −459.67 °F)..."
I guess, a special device is needed. The size of such device will be in thousands of mobile phones just in volume needed.
There wasn't much money in miniaturizing them so far. Cooling down tiny amounts of matter is much easier than cooling down larger amounts, so maybe there's hope for a microchip sized BEC in 20 years.
"multiple identical composite bosons (in this context sometimes known as 'bose particles') behave at high densities or low temperatures in a characteristic manner described by Bose–Einstein statistics: for example a gas of helium-4 atoms becomes a superfluid at temperatures close to absolute zero."
Helium leaks as nothing else, even more than hydrogen.
Let's say we have a um^3 of helium in the device proposed. Let's assume leak rate of 8*10^-9 of cm^3/sec. (1e-6/1e-2)^3/(8e-9)
is equal to 1.2499999999999998e-4 - all helium will leak in 1/8 of microsecond in the device proposed.
The MEMS accelerometers in our phones are in theory sensitive to gravity changes, but they're not nearly sensitive enough. This group is trying to improve the MEMS sensing technology, but it's doubtful it will be as good as classical gravity meters (falling mass, or spring) or quantum (BEC) ones:
One important distinction is between measuring gravity (generally, acceleration in the vertical direction) and the gravity gradient. The latter is generally easier and more useful for navigation.
"This is precisely the information required by the traditional method of celestial navigation, and it is accomplished without the need to surface or use a sextant!"
It's somewhat unlikely (but not impossible) that this method is based on navigating by matching patterns of the shape of the geoid (aka variations in g).
We need accurate maps of the geoid for a lot of different reasons. (Military as well as civilian. Potential fields geophysics is super useful for all kinds of different geologic use cases, and regardless, if you want to target an ICBM, you need an accurate geoid.)
However, a super precise gravimeter doesn't help much. We have more precision than we can use already. Rather ancient spring-based instruments from 100 years ago can actually still give more precision than we can use in many cases. Modern ship-borne gravity instruments work on different principles, but the signal is very noisy for the same external reasons.
The biggest issue is that you also need to know absolute elevation very precisely to use the measurement of g that you get. A few millimeters of error in elevation significantly changes the anomaly measurement you make. Sure, submarines can get accurate hydrostatic measurements of depth, but those assume a lot of things and critically aren't absolute. The ocean has currents - that's another way of saying that the surface of the ocean isn't "sea level". Those vary through time and would require satellite information to correct for. However, once you get down in the weeds, it gets tougher still.
Remember that we're dealing with an inverse square distance relationship. Things close by matter quite a lot.
People nearby standing in different positions? That actually does affect things. Easy enough to mount the instrument away from people, though. Different distributions of mass in the submarine? Also affects the measurement. You can correct for all of these in various ways, though, so long as you have information on it. It's just more complexity and another source of noise.
In the end, the "free air anomaly" measurement you'd be correcting things to is an bathymetry map, to the first order. If there's a landslide, that affects things quite a bit, and those happen all the time.
Finally, you'd be matching a "fingerprint" time series measurement as you travel to a pre made map. That's a non unique relationship. You'd have heading/etc information to help the non uniqueness part significantly, but when things don't vary much (i.e flat topography and not a ton varying geologically), you don't have much of a unique signal to match to.
At any rate, it's a very useful tool for many other things, but I'm skeptical it could be turned into a precise navigational aid. In combination with traditional gyroscopic/etc measurements of heading and distance, it could help constrain uncertainty, but it's not an independent measurement and it's relatively noisy.
Now that I think about it, though, a fully passive "seamount proximity sensor" is rather useful, and that's something you'd get even with a noisy signal...
> The biggest issue is that you also need to know absolute elevation very precisely to use the measurement of g that you get.
I don't think so. What you are saying is true if for some reason you want to work with absolute values, but nobody would do that. You measure many data points as your submarine flies over the landscape for a time, and then you match the measured curve with predicted curves from bathymetric maps. This is an optimisation problem where you try to find the best match. Precise elevation is an output from this process not an input requirement.
> but when things don't vary much (i.e flat topography and not a ton varying geologically), you don't have much of a unique signal to match to
100%. This is also true for cruise missiles which fly by TERCOM[1]. And there is an interesting consequence to it. Submarines and cruise missiles don't just bumble around randomly. The navigators also know this limitation so they set trajectories which plays to their strength. In the case of the cruise missile planners they have tools to evaluate the navigational quality of a terrain contour matching algorithm over a proposed trajectory with Monte Carlo methods. Probably submariners have the same.
This means in practice you can know that the submarines are more likely to take certain routes. They will prefer approaching from hilly terrain over flat, but also over extended flat areas they will prefer to overfly butes to regain navigational accuracy. This of course won't tell you precisely where the submarine is, but can help an adversary more economically allocate their ASW assets.
> At any rate, it's a very useful tool for many other things, but I'm skeptical it could be turned into a precise navigational aid
Yeah. I mean I heard that people proposed to make measurements of stars to find your location. The fools. Haven't they heard of clouds? Sometimes you can't see as far as your own nose for days.
Every navigational system ever devised have limitations and peculiarities. If you are comparing gravitational tercom with the ease and quality and simplicity of GPS then of course it will look crude and cumbersome. But of course GPS adds other complications and dangers to the life of a submariner. Used well, and in the right circumstances it can be potentially very valuable technique.
> What you are saying is true if for some reason you want to work with absolute values, but nobody would do that. You measure many data points as your submarine flies over the landscape for a time, and then you match the measured curve with predicted curves from bathymetric maps.
The variations due to changes in elevation are orders of magnitude larger than the variations you're relying on using for navigation. Distance from the center of the Earth is the primary signal you're measuring, for better or worse. It's not just relative vs absolute. You can probably assume the sub isn't changing depth rapidly and ocean currents are long wavelength, which would allow relative measurements to be somewhat feasible.
However, nothing about this requires a new quantum sensor. Ship-borne gravity anomaly measurements have been around for half a century. The previous methods are more than precise enough. In fact, they were done on submarines first before ships - it's easier to measure without waves.
What's triggering this now? Something doesn't add up... If it were purely based on using gravity anomaly along track measurements as a "fingerprint", it wouldn't need a new sensor. There's likely another mechanism they're using or they're using it for other reasons in addition to navigation.
> However, nothing about this requires a new quantum sensor.
Sure. The news can be many thing. Maybe they got a marginally better gyroscope. Maybe it is not better in terms of better error characteristic, but cheaper, or smaller, or lower maintenance.
Or maybe they got a new software package which brings them benefits, but the way they could sell it to the leaders is by telling them that the sensor they are using is "quantum".
Or maybe none of the above and they are just trying to fake out an adversary to trigger a costly mistake.
I wonder how close you'd need to be for any small-scale buoyancy differences to be detectable, given the entire object would clearly be neutrally-buoyant.
If you throw a baseball in an accelerating enormous elevator in a vacuum, the baseball will follow a parabolic arc.
If you throw a baseball on the vacuum surface of a planet, it will almost (but not quite) follow a parabolic arc. The force of gravity is lower at the peak, unlike in the elevator where acceleration is constant everywhere in the elevator.
Therefore, you can distinguish gravity from acceleration
Isn't this the method used by the sub in Hunt for Red October? Or did they also use a gyroscopic and look for changes in the gravitational vector, not just its magnitude?
I haven't read the book, but in the film the problem was the Red October was using the caterpillar-drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive (and not a propeller/impeller) but a chance detection by Dallas' sonar along with the ingenuity of Dallas' sonar operator, who figured out how to detect and track Sean Connery's boat. Nothing to do with gravity or gyroscopes at all.
Yes, but Red October had some super accurate underwater gravity map of some kind that allowed them to navigate at speed through areas Dallas couldn't follow IIRC.
Red October used the usual gyroscopes approach that gets more and more inaccurate as it sails. I think a key plot point is that they need to surface to take a latitude / longitude , precipitating much suspense.
what a sad outcome it is that research such as this is funded for, and classified by military interests such that it is barred from public collaboration and societal progress
Looks like what's happening is they've found a way to use BSEs [1] to measure small variations in the earth's gravity caused by undersea terrain, probably so that they can then use existing satelite measured data [2], to recover absolute position via Terrain Contour Matching [3] like a gulf war tomahawk missle.
Edit: Seems like there's another company that's doing the same thing [4] with BSEs [5].
"The quantum accelerometer uses ultracold atoms to make highly accurate measurements. When cooled to extremely low temperatures the atoms start to display their ‘quantum’ nature, resulting in wave-like properties. As the atoms move through the sensor, an ‘optical ruler’ is formed by using a series of laser pulses. This allows the acceleration of the atoms to be precisely measured."
Vacuum mechanical gyros were used until about the 1960's when lasers (RLGs) were introduced. In the 90's, some RLGs were replaced by HRGs where space is at a premium for Q around 1e7-8. Very large RLGs are still used to detect very slow rotation and can have Q factors on the order of 1e13.
Yes, also, while I have only worked on military boats and never on subs, I can straight away tell you that anyone who would know anything remotely interesting or close to the cutting edge regarding inertial navigation system for subs wouldn't be able to talk about it.
It's one of these subjects where you will never get anything better that vague press releases designed to justify research budgets.
I couldn’t tell from the abstract but does the device measure the atom drift in 3 dimensions or do we need a sensor fusion of three atoms to get 3D translation?
The article links to a better article, https://news.sky.com/story/royal-navys-experimental-ship-car..., which calls the device an accelerometer. I think the article linked here got literally all its information from that other article. Apparently it's a small number of rubidium atoms, cooled to near-absolute zero, under which conditions they can apparently measure gravitational effects and make deductions from that ("measure extremely accurately the influence of gravity on their system, which in turn allows them to measure the speed and direction of its movement").
I'd argue that the gravity field of a sub is not uniform despite having neutral buoyancy. No idea though how significant that is vs. how sensible the measurement is
There probaly would be, the displacement might be the same but the distribution of mass wouldn't. But I recon these instruments are only sensitive enough to measure the difference between the seafloor and the water above.
The article lacks detail, but sounds like it's talking about something like an atomic gyroscope[1].
There are a few types of passive quantum navigation systems, but the principle is similar to a using a stopwatch and an old-school gyroscope to measure changes in momentum and then calculating your position via dead reckoning. It just sounds like quantum methods have let them get a lot more precise.
This is actually pretty exciting from the perspective of deep sea exploration. Once you get below the surface there's no GPS and it becomes difficult to fix your position. With one of these, you'd have something like GPS no matter how deep you go.
Submarines have had good inertial navigation systems since the 1960s. Early gyros occupied about a cubic meter.[1] With a really big, heavy flywheel, it's easier to keep drift down. Nuclear submarines usually had three installed, for redundancy.
This is pretty exciting from the perspective of any kind of navigation. If this gets into a phone, we will be able to navigate on a digital map with no signal at all.
A friend of mine got PTSD from piloting huge nuclear subs in subsea ravines with a clearing of only one inch on each side of the sub. One wrong move, and the entire crew is gone. He also had to do this in conditions similar to surface storms. Looks like autonomous or automatic systems may be developed for those kinds of manoeuvres now, if it is truly that precise. Seems like a huge leap in navigational systems.
Not really. Subs don’t move that fast in those tight of conditions. One wrong move and the sub bumps the canyon wall making a bunch of noise. Unless they are in actively hostile waters, it just means loss of stealth and the sub needs to choose a new location to lurk.
"On 8 January 2005 at 02:43 GMT, San Francisco collided with an undersea mountain about 364 nautical miles (675 km) southeast of Guam while operating at flank (maximum) speed at a depth of 525 feet (160 m)."
So, here's an anecdote of a sub that miraculously survived a head on collision. What's your point?
From the same article:
“The collision was so serious that the vessel was almost lost; accounts detail a desperate struggle for positive buoyancy to surface after the forward ballast tanks were ruptured.”
I doubt these are problems any submarine crew wants to deal with, even at slow speeds. Besides, one sharp edge at the sides will open her right up like a tin can.
I can't speak for the poster, but I would guess it's something along the lines of "military subs are pretty tough," and the bit about killing everyone onboard with a slow collision may have been an exaggeration.
They are meant for warfare and surviving torpedo concussions as much as possible, so depending on speed, a slow scrape with terrain might not be fatal.
Or it might be fatal. You don't know that. What we do know is the general construction of a sub, which is that of an "egg". It's built to withstand extreme global pressure (pressure from all sides at once, like water does). But as I'm sure you've noticed, eggs don't hold up very well against needles.
A few meters of clearance I could beleive but I don't think the hydrodnymaics and control/reaction times works allows for that at all even if you had the measurements nailed.
Also maybe not! I don't know what the phenomenon is called, but large ships going though the canals create their own buffer to some extent. It's pretty cool!
When a storyteller has clearly hyperbolized the parts of their story that can be fact checked, they have destroyed any reason to believe the remainder of their words.
99% sure this is for mapping the seafloor and preforming localization based on that like pre-gps cruise missles missles did with downward facing radar.
I'd expect it to be light on details. It is a project funded by the Royal Navy for next-generation navigation. Thye don't really want to give away details other than, "we have this"
A recent TV news report covered this in the UK. The only thing they could show was an prototype in a lab setting and a sealed white box on the test platform boat.
Can a submerged military submarine let divers "out",
and / or divers "in"?
Do they have air locks / water locks?
It would seem possible, enormously dependent on the depth of the submarine.
Not just from the perspective of the integrity of the giant uboat but
also the integrity of divers.
In movies (which are always "accurate") they put people into torpedo tubes.
Which I believe do feature some form of an air locks and ports to open and close.
Not sure a person would fit, or if it is physically possible given the operation of the tube.
If possible, can they enter the same way?
My second question is if you can do deep sea fishing? (while submerged)
Have fresh as can be sushi?
I figure if you can let a person in and out, that person could go
hunt fish and bring it back.
They dont have windows but from sonar does pick up some sea creatures.
You could possibly have a harpoon with a sensor on it you could extend to
catch fish.
It just seems it ought to be possible.
With a nuclear submarine, I think, one of the limits to how long you can
operate before requiring supplies is food.
I hope a nuclear submarine has a way to creating fresh water from salt water
as benefit for having a reactor.
at least.
"The XV Patrick Blackett, the Navy’s new experimental vessel, provided the setting for the experiment. Sky News said the ship makes a perfect host for the futuristic experiment — it boasts a sleek design, featuring tinted windows and a glossy black hull."
What's the point of knowing where you are if you don't look cool while you're there? /s
On the other hand, I do appreciate the efficiency of serving the PR mission and the testing mission with the same boat.
As mentioned here [1] they use atom interferometry to build extremely precise sensors of acceleration and rotation. This is everything needed to build an inertial navigation system (INS). This is completely independent of any external system. My guess is that this is what makes is so interesting for subs.
Probably the biggest issue with INSs is accuracy of the raw IMU measurements. The acceleration must be integrated twice. That means any error in the measurement gets exponentially larger with time. Rotation velocity measurements are integrated only once (some IMUs measure absolute orientation but it is not the case here) so the error does not explode as fast. Is is the combination with translation that is problematic. If you rotate around vertical axis by 90deg +/- 1% and then travel for 1000km +/- 1% the rotation accuracy will cause bigger error in final location.
To have an INS capable of long time operation without any other means of drift correction one has to nail many other things.
- Gravitational constant varies and you have to have an accurate map of it. We might not have a good enough one. I don't know. The subs could collect their measurements and perform a large scale optimization to increase the accuracy of this map.
- The rotation of earth gets added to the rotation speed measurements. The rotation is not constant (hence the leap seconds from now and then). We have to be able to extrapolate it well enough.
- Sampling rate of the quantum IMU has to be high enough. How usefull is the most precise measurement if you can measure only once in 10 minutes? Traditional IMUs sample at 1 kHz and more.
- Does the new quantum gyroscope add enough value to the accuracy of the final IMU compared to Fibre-optic gyroscopes? They are incredibly accurate as they are based on laser interferometry and then can sample at high frequency. Plus they are an established technology which partially benefits from economy of scale [5] because they are used in airplanes [6].
- The measurements of both rotation velocity and acceleration have to be measured in 3 axes. Are the relative orientations and translations of those axes stable enough as the device moves?
- Is the noise present in the measurements corelated to something or is it truly random? The corelation could mean an systematic error to the state estimate.
- You will likely also have to have an atomic clock on board labeling each IMU measurement as soon as it is made. But this is not a problem nowadays as one can have a small Rubidium-based atomic clock in a package starting to resemble a chip [2] [3] [4].
- And of course you will need enough computing power to calculate everything. I'm not sure how modern hardware they are allowed on board of nuclear-carrying subs. This is slight problem for things like Mars rover as due to the testing requirements the main chip can be easily 30 years old when the rocket is launched [7].
Also, the situation is not as bad as we can utilize the sensor fusion and correct lots of errors caused by IMU measurements. From the top of my head one can obviously measure water pressure which estimates depth (with some error). Sea bed topology could be other type of measurement but my guess is that this measurement is too crude compared to the accuracy of the quantum-based INS.
This sounds like fancy next-gen inertial navigation. You’ll still need charts (and ENCs) and still need GPS (for periodic updates to the inertially derived position).
Inertial navigation is a form of dead reckoning. It needs periodic updates (GPS fixes) to stay accurate.
If this however works like some other commenters have theorized (by finding reliable matches to the known contour of the bottom of the ocean), it's not a form of dead reckoning and can instead be used as a fix for dead reckoning.
Possibly, military submarines are interested in only a small part of the ocean. The Strait of Hormuz probably is well-mapped; some spot in the middle of the Indian Ocean might be unneeded.
I'm surprised we don't see more military research for SAT-NAV alternatives. In any big conflict SAT-NAV is trivial to turn off. If you can still position yourself and your enemy can't, that is an enormous advantage in targeting, logistics, coordination, and situational awareness. Seems like a no-brainer.
You're probably surprised that you don't see it, because it's top secret.
Here's an example of something you don't hear about: AI Assisted Battlefield Tactics. While I've never heard of it (certainly not in the press), I simply assume that they're doing research on it. I base this assumption on the AlphaStar AI from DeepMind that would completely pawn Grand Masters in the game of StarCraft 2.
While AlphaStar is obviously designed for a game with very set rules and weights, I don't think it's unfeasible to develop a similar military AI that could also work in the shifting tactics of the modern battlefields.
The result would be comical, as larger armies without such an AI would always lose to someone with that AI, even if their army is much smaller or seemingly technologically disadvantaged. And it would seem that there's at least one such country in such a position today, which is also heavily supported by the NATO.
AlphaStar hardly pawned GMs in any meaningful way. It mainly won on mechanics, even when Deepmind tried to nerf its mechanics. Probably the most important thing is that the “200 APM limit” is way higher than any human can do, because it made use of each one of its actions. Humans can reach 400+ APM by spamming, but their EPM will stay much lower than 200. The result is that it had god-tier micro that changed the game completely: zergling runby’s are normally good for Zerg and bad for Protoss. With alphastar, it was the opposite, because it could micro to avoid losing any workers. Its disruptor micro was again unmatched.
Now, my last argument for why alphastar wasn’t some sort of brilliant tactician was that eventually people figured out that it’s susceptible to all the same problems a normal bot is: you can dart a warp prism in and out of its vision and it will send its army back and forth, you can confuse it by going mass raven/PF etc. and it’s completely unable to adapt. So in conclusion, no: AlphaStar doesn’t say anything one way or another about military AIs.
> I often wonder how much autocorrect will shape the evolution of language
Apple recently announced that it was going to stop autocorrecting a certain expletive intensifier to "ducking", and I think that one actually had the potential to catch on....
I wonder if it'll ultimately do more to preserve ridiculous quirks of English spelling (and US/UK distinctions) most people don't remember or care about than change language
That’s hilarious, I did actually write “pawned” intentionally, but while writing it I thought, “Haven’t heard this one before, but I guess it makes sense, it treated them like pawns in chess”
> Also AlphaStar can teach absolutely nothing to the army tacticians.
This is the only sentence of your summary that accurately portrays my comment.
I do think they are investing in tactical AIs, you even see it with those new loyal wingman UAVs. But the notion that AlphaStar proves that we already have tactical AIs that outperform humans is absurd.
There are plenty of niches but most people aren't aware of them: surveying and navigation. There's nothing particular secret about an RLG or an MRG at this time. There are enough examples of civilian industrial equipment using them. There are also MEMS-based accelerometers, such as those in your phone, and ones with several orders more precision and accuracy.
Applications include:
- Underground
- Under dense rainforest canopy where GNSS signals don't reach
- In narrow and deep valleys
- Salt water deeper than 200 mm
- In space, far away from GNSS systems (GNSSes work in space)
Source: I may have wandered through Trimble Nav Ltd. once or twice.
The battlefield is nothing like StarCraft though. StarCraft gives you real time control and visibility of every soldier and every enemy within the view range of any of your units. That has approximately no overlap with how command works in real militaries.
The battlefield is nothing like StarCraft? Think of SC as a top down model for how a real battlefield map can be. Just give each actor more realistic traits. So no strange Protoss or Zerg creatures! Perhaps base it on a more probabilistic model that treats each contact more as an uncertainty, like it would be under the fog of war.
Suddenly you've got a viable model to use on real tactical maps, that is strikingly similar to SC2, though adapted to real life conditions. That is, if you're able to track - or in the least theorize the position of - each individual "piece" on that board (so soldiers and armour, etc).
A real life soldier does perhaps have some different qualities and abilities than a space marine, but it's still a great starting point for building a more realistic model.
So say, your model looks more like Arma 3... Only top down. Now, I've been in the army, so I can tell you first hand that many aspects of Arma 3 is scarily realistic. Other aspects, not so much. But if you add in some modding, and all that is solved.
It's the same principle. You've already have a base AI to "play the game" and now you adapt each information point to reflect real life instead of game mechanics.
Sure, this sort of AI is brand new, so there would of course be things to iron out. Perhaps you need to use other statistical models to better capture the fog of war. But at the end of it, I think it can be done. Hell, perhaps it can even be used to fight crime. What do I know, perhaps it already is, but nobody wants to talk about it, kind of like how it was such a great moment when it dropped that New Scotland Yards used graph databases to solve cases before it was cool.
Arma 3 might be somewhat realistic, but that has nothing to do with what I’m saying about Warcraft 3. I’m saying the level of micromanagement and perfect information in W3 is completely unlike how actual battlefields can be managed.
AI that is good at W3 manages every individual unit’s actions and it does that based on a map that magically reveals enemies when you get close. Nothing like that would ever work IRL.
There is a very specific problem - the simulation speed problem - that is in the way.
For games RL agents can be trained by running billions of adversarial simulations. Set up a battle between two agents and reward the one that wins, try variations and repeat, and repeat, and repeat. The trick is to manage the search process so as to not waste time on strategy branches that won't get anywhere, but the idea is very simple.
Unfortunately for things like real world conflict the simulations aren't that representative of what really happens, they are also really really really really complex and slow, and so finding wining strategies is a bit hard.
Lately I have been trying to improve performance of a high precision RTK GNSS receiver installed somewhere high up on the Barents sea, near the Russian border with Norway. Some days it works perfectly down to cm accuracy, but other days it is not able to hold an RTK fix at all.
I was suspecting the northern lights were to blame for most of this trouble since the bad performance periods more or less track to high Kp periods, but it seems that it may be man made interference... There are recent reports from planes flying routes over that area about bad GNSS reception, and efforts from NKOM to log conditions with mobile antennas.
Stars are broadband light sources, there isn't a specific starlight wavelength. Likewise, the Raleigh scattering in the atmosphere is largely a broadband source of light, since it is a reflection of our sun's light. You might get some slight benefit by looking at the redder end of the spectrum, but the improvement won't be massive.
However, stars are (to the nearest approximation) point sources. If you use a telescope and zoom in to the star, then you can spread the atmosphere brightness over a large area while concentrating the starlight into a very small area, which means you can see stars during the day. Couple that with a reasonable level of high dynamic range sensor and integration over time, and it would be quite possible to observe the positions of a load of stars during the day.
> What would a startup need to make this work as a business?
Extensive contacts in the submarine navigation ecosystem and several decades of deep knowledge of highly complex, highly classified, related navigation systems that this product would need to interoperate with.
This tech is not a magic locator machine on its own, it's a component that improves one small but important part of a very large and complex locator system and locator ecosystem.
If the startup has that sort of contact list and experience, it's probably not a startup, it is most likely a division of one of a very small number of very large defense contractors.
(And for those who might argue it's not just for submarines, if the startup has the relevant contacts in the submarine navigation ecosystem, it probably also has the relevant contacts in the other equally classified navigation ecosystems like for cruise missiles and etc., and the technicals aspects of this particular part of the problem domain will probably be relevant across other platform types, even if the details of submarine vs cruise missile inertial navigation platforms are different.)
Thank you, two more questions: do we expect that other governments in the world will build a similar system soon? and/or how many years of advantage does the Royal Navy have?
Nobody knows what the Royal Navy actually has. Nobody knows what other governments have. You are in the realm of what are the actual capabilities of nuclear weapons carrying subs. You can safely assume than anything remotely interesting is classified.
It’s a naval chart that would not require surfacing.
A French postdoc in my lab swore this was the moneymaker for our entire subfield, and it seems he was on to something …