The UK’s first quantum accelerometer for navigation has been demonstrated by a team from Imperial College London and M Squared. Losing GPS (global positioning satellites) service for one day would cost the UK £1 billion. Losing GPS is also a large concern for advanced militaries. Precision warfare depends upon GPS.
UK team has demonstrated a transportable, standalone quantum accelerometer at the National Quantum Technologies Showcase.
The quantum accelerometer has precision and accuracy possible by measuring properties of supercool atoms. At extremely low temperatures, the atoms behave in a ‘quantum’ way, acting like both matter and waves.
The current system is designed for navigation of large vehicles, such as ships and even trains. However, the principle can also be used for fundamental science research, such as in the search for dark energy and gravitational waves, which the Imperial team are also working on.
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bonus question- what do you think will be the state of on-earth and in space transportation in 600 years
What do you all think: saay 600 years until star trek teleportation? sooner? later?
OK, I never got why GPS was the be all and end all for navigation. Sure when you you are off road or sailing on the ocean then sure, it is vital. But if you are on a track or a road wouldn’t a modest accelerometer combined with odometer and turn angle tracking be sufficient to sync you up with an accurate map? This kind of scheme would be a great back up if the GPS system ever went down.
Can this type of navigation be useful for spacecraft too? Or would space radiation automatically prevent such devices from working reliably?
Indeed, many systems used a combination of gyroscopes (spinning rust and/or laser), radio waves, radar, the stars, etc before GPS. GPS just became cheaper and easier to use (no navigators needed, can fly without active radar to give you away, more reliable than inertial measurement units, etc.). We can go back to those systems, it just slows things down a bit, degrades some capability, and costs more.
Nit: Precision warfare depends on precision navigation, not necessarily GPS, which is just one navigation tool (though a huge one) in the box of tricks.
These accelerometers will be quite more useful when they have the size of sugar cubes or grains of sand -and embeddable in our cars and cellphones.But the fact they are cryogenic in nature so far may pose a challenge.
I was curious so I looked around. There are no specs on this but navigation grade accelerometers should be in the 1ng to 10ng max acceleration noise range (consumer ones are easily hundreds of ug). There are other teams making quantum accelerometers and the novelty of this one appears to be it is commercially packaged and the beam used to cool the atom is also used as the ruler.
What do you all think: saay 600 years until star trek teleportation? sooner? later?
Nit: Precision warfare depends on precision navigation, not necessarily GPS, which is just one navigation tool (though a huge one) in the box of tricks.
OK, I never got why GPS was the be all and end all for navigation. Sure when you you are off road or sailing on the ocean then sure, it is vital. But if you are on a track or a road wouldn’t a modest accelerometer combined with odometer and turn angle tracking be sufficient to sync you up with an accurate map? This kind of scheme would be a great back up if the GPS system ever went down.
Can this type of navigation be useful for spacecraft too? Or would space radiation automatically prevent such devices from working reliably?
bonus question- what do you think will be the state of on-earth and in space transportation in 600 years
What do you all think: saay 600 years until star trek teleportation? sooner? later?
Indeed, many systems used a combination of gyroscopes (spinning rust and/or laser), radio waves, radar, the stars, etc before GPS. GPS just became cheaper and easier to use (no navigators needed, can fly without active radar to give you away, more reliable than inertial measurement units, etc.). We can go back to those systems, it just slows things down a bit, degrades some capability, and costs more.
Nit: Precision warfare depends on precision navigation, not necessarily GPS, which is just one navigation tool (though a huge one) in the box of tricks.
bonus question- what do you think will be the state of on-earth and in space transportation in 600 years
What do you all think: saay 600 years until star trek teleportation? sooner? later?
OK, I never got why GPS was the be all and end all for navigation. Sure when you you are off road or sailing on the ocean then sure, it is vital. But if you are on a track or a road wouldn’t a modest accelerometer combined with odometer and turn angle tracking be sufficient to sync you up with an accurate map? This kind of scheme would be a great back up if the GPS system ever went down.
Indeed, many systems used a combination of gyroscopes (spinning rust and/or laser), radio waves, radar, the stars, etc before GPS. GPS just became cheaper and easier to use (no navigators needed, can fly without active radar to give you away, more reliable than inertial measurement units, etc.). We can go back to those systems, it just slows things down a bit, degrades some capability, and costs more.
Nit: Precision warfare depends on precision navigation, not necessarily GPS, which is just one navigation tool (though a huge one) in the box of tricks.
OK, I never got why GPS was the be all and end all for navigation. Sure when you you are off road or sailing on the ocean then sure, it is vital. But if you are on a track or a road wouldn’t a modest accelerometer combined with odometer and turn angle tracking be sufficient to sync you up with an accurate map? This kind of scheme would be a great back up if the GPS system ever went down.
These accelerometers will be quite more useful when they have the size of sugar cubes or grains of sand -and embeddable in our cars and cellphones.But the fact they are cryogenic in nature so far may pose a challenge.
I was curious so I looked around. There are no specs on this but navigation grade accelerometers should be in the 1ng to 10ng max acceleration noise range (consumer ones are easily hundreds of ug). There are other teams making quantum accelerometers and the novelty of this one appears to be it is commercially packaged and the beam used to cool the atom is also used as the ruler.
These accelerometers will be quite more useful when they have the size of sugar cubes or grains of sand -and embeddable in our cars and cellphones.
But the fact they are cryogenic in nature so far may pose a challenge.
I was curious so I looked around. There are no specs on this but navigation grade accelerometers should be in the 1ng to 10ng max acceleration noise range (consumer ones are easily hundreds of ug). There are other teams making quantum accelerometers and the novelty of this one appears to be it is commercially packaged and the beam used to cool the atom is also used as the ruler.