Solar storm hits GNSS systems
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Tractor maker John Deere sent out warnings over the weekend about the impact of the solar storm on its satellite positioning tech.
The severe G5 solar storm that created the northern lights across the US and Europe this weekend have also had an impact on GNSS satellite positing systems and John Deere is looking for a tool to predict future issues.
“Please be advised that there is significant solar flare and space weather activity currently affecting GPS and RTK networks. This severe geomagnetic storm is the worst since 2005 and is forecasted to continue throughout the weekend,” said John Deere.
The company uses real time kinematic (RTK) technology to broadcast correction data to the StarFire SF2 and SF3 satellite receivers on its tractors in fields.
“We have found that the best course of action at this time is to shut off RTK and use a grace period for SF2/SF3. This will eliminate the conflicting corrections that the machine is receiving from the base station due to the geomagnetic storm. GPS accuracy will still likely be reduced due to the storms,” it said.
“We believe that the SF2 and SF3 accuracy is also extremely compromised as well due to this storm. Due to the way the RTK network works, the base stations were sending out corrections that have been affected by the geomagnetic storm and were causing drastic shifts in the field and even some heading changes that were drastic. Because SF2 and SF3 do not receive all of these corrections, those signals weren’t affected as much, but we do suspect that the pass-to-pass accuracy is extremely degraded while still allowing customers to run.
“The effects of this storm were more detrimental to the StarFire 3000 and 6000 receivers due to those models only having access to two satellite constellations. The StarFire 7000 and 7500s have access to 4 satellite constellations which allowed them to fight through these issues better, but they still lost accuracy. Upgrading to a StarFire 7000 or 7500 will provide an improvement, but is not a cure-all.”
“To be clear, this isn’t a problem with our RTK network,” it said. “The RTK was affected more due to its ability to have more corrections and it is a higher accuracy system anyway. More corrections coming in that were “bad” created more inaccuracy than we saw in the other systems. The storm has affected all brands of GPS, not solely John Deere.”
The company is looking for a tool to predict future events, and the European Space Agency (ESA) is planning to launch a satellite to improve the early warning from 12 hours to 5 days, but not until 2031.
“We do believe this historic event and it isn’t something that we are going to have to continue to battle frequently,” it said,
In the meantime ESA, which runs the Galileo GNSS satellite navigation system, has been monitoring solar flares using three satellites called SMOS and Swarm. Back in March, the three satellites tracked the severe solar storm which warped Earth’s magnetic field.
“After 14 years, SMOS still has plenty more tricks up its sleeve,” says Klaus Scipal, SMOS Mission Manager. “Its versatility, like that of all the Earth Explorers, is hugely impressive and its continued potential for space weather monitoring is very exciting indeed.”
What the Swarm satellites detect depends on many factors, such as energy, solar magnetic field orientation, and how many charged particles enter Earth’s atmosphere over the poles.
“Space weather may well originate outside our planet, but outages to navigation and power show it can have potentially hazardous effects here on Earth,” says ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Simonetta Cheli. “It’s exciting therefore to see two of our Earth Explorer missions combining to monitor solar events and to better understand how they affect our planet. It once again demonstrates the versatility and excellence of Europe’s Earth observation programmes.”
The Vigil mission will monitor the side of the Sun, spotting areas of potentially hazardous solar storm activity before they rotate into view of Earth and provide the first 24/7 operational data from deep space by ESA. This will increase the advance warning of key space weather effects from 12-18 hours up to four to five days in advance after it launches in 2031.
www.esa.int; www.landmarkimp.com
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