GPS World

Tag: live coverage

  • Cyber Warfare: Report from the 30th Space Symposium

    Report from the 30th Annual Space Symposium, May 19-22, Broadmoor Resort, Colorado Springs, Colorado

    For the past five years, the first day of the National Space Symposium — now known simply as the Space Symposium, the largest symposium of its kind in the world — has started with an entire day dedicated to discussions of the cyber domain as it pertains to the DoD and civilian industry. The annual event highlights presentations from the major civilian cyber players and the senior cyber commander for the DoD, military services and government agencies. Several of the now-senior military officers worked for or with me as junior officers at some point in the past, and while that is an age-related humbling experience, it also makes me proud of them at the same time.

    One major talking point, among many, is crystal clear: the U.S. government and civilian enterprises alike understand that cyber security is a critical mission and that cyber warfare, especially from a nation-state point of view, is a credible and viable threat to every government and civilian program and and to everyone today.

    Major General Kevin McLaughlin, currently the commander of 24th Air Force and AFCYBER, the major command that takes cyber warfare to heart as a major mission, is one of those young officers in my past that make me proud today. Kevin was the luncheon speaker, and he put the Air Force role for cyber warfare in perspective as well as explaining how the Air Force role is integral to the overall Defense Cyber Enterprise. This integration role may seem like a small matter, but General McLaughlin’s explanation of Air Force and DoD cyber and IA (Information Assurance) synergy is critical to the success of his organization and mission.

    This is critical because throughout my Air Force career and even today I constantly encounter commanders that are quick — too quick in my book — to explain, usually with great passion, why their particular mission(s) are critically important and “unique” to the Air Force writ large enterprise. Unfortunately, history shows us that “unique” organizations within services do not always fare well in budget scenarios, especially seques-castration budgets.

    In my humble but experienced opinion, the senior officers commanding these “unique” organizations, be they cyber or otherwise, would fare far better if they conformed to Air Force budget requirements and still conducted their day-to-day unique missions just like a fighter pilot and fighter sortie. By that I mean you never know what you will encounter on a fighter sortie. You never know what the enemy will throw at you but you can rest assured that any plan, no matter how well conceived, will not survive initial contact with the enemy. The plan always changes and will hopefully be successful, but only because of flexibility, which has been described as the key to air power, and certainly not because of the “plan.”

    So, I was assured when Gen. McLaughlin described “A Day in the Life of a Cyber Warrior” just as I would a fighter sortie. Prepare for the known threat and expect the unexpected. Be innovative and flexible, and you may win the battle and live to fight another day, because make no mistake about it, cyber warfare is a life-and-death struggle.

    Fortunately, there do seem to be solutions that work, and a key point that was made numerous times by various speakers is that the small, small, usually local cyber warrior company is often times much more successful than the security behemoths that tend to get bogged down in their own administrative minutia. One of the companies mentioned was NDP, a small cyber and IA company in Boulder, Colorado, known for its work slaying the cyber dragons attacking the well-known SBIRS (Space Based Infrared System) program. The story goes that NDP, with only 50 employees, took on major global SBIRS cyber and IA issues and made it look simple. It is always the real experts that make it look simple. The chairman of one of panels really put it in perspective when he opined, “Would you really want Raytheon or Boeing providing anti-virus software for your home computer? Probably not! No slight to the mega companies intended, but I would go with the local, flexible and responsive small company, like NDP, every time.”

    Thankfully, a lot of what I heard this year, as opposed to years past, conforms to the scenario I just described. Bad cyber actors (villains), local or nation state, are anticipated, and while the white-hat cyber warriors win more times than they lose, it is clear there is currently no panacea for cyber and IA threats — just hard work, diligence and flexibility to hopefully win the conflict.

  • Art Kalinski Reports from the GEOINT Symposium

    Art Kalinski, Geointelligence Editor, interviewed USGIF CEO Keith Masback about GEOINT 2013*, being held this week in Tampa, Florida. Mossback discusses new technology, future combat systems, and plans for the 2015 conference. Watch the interview above.

    Kalinksi has been reporting from GEOINT* 2013 all week, with video reports. His coverage of Day Three includes visits with experts at six booths in the exhibit hall, including a demonstration of the Occulus Rift 3D glasses and an inkjet printer that produces 3D terrain models, as well as an interview with USGIF CEO Keith Mossback about the show and plans for next year.

    Coverage of Day Two includes a press briefing with Lettitia Long, director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA); a demonstration by Airbus; and a visit to the Skyline booth.

    Read his coverage of Day One of the symposium here. Included are videoclips from a DigitalGlobe presentation about the TomNod crowdsourcing efforts to find Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

    Learn more about Art’s plans in his monthly column, or watch his introduction.

  • Time to Hit Warp Speed, Galileo

    Report from ENC: Constellation Needs 22 Satellites in Three Years

    Launch, deploy, and operate “22 satellites in less than 3 years.” That’s two satellites every three months, leading to a four-at-once launch in 2014. And that’s the challenge that Europe and the European Space Agency (ESA) now face.

    This pointed call to action during the opening plenary of the European Navigation Conference (ENC) came from Didier Faivre, director of Galileo Programme and Navigation Related Activities at ESA. It was the only somber note sounded during the keynote speeches, which otherwise paraded the stirring recent accomplishments of the Galileo In-Orbit Validation (IOV) phase. IOV now concludes, and Galileo’s operational phase opens.

    The ENC takes place in Vienna, Austria this week (April 23–25), hosted by the Austrian Institute of Navigation. Privately and informally, a handful of knowledgeable conference attendees expressed confidence that OHB System can furnish the completed satellites, at least, according to schedule. OHB System is the prime contractor for  construction of 22 Full Operational Capability (FOC) Galileo satellites and is responsible for developing the satellite bus and for integrating the satellites. Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) is developing and constructing the navigation payload and  assisting OHB with final satellite assembly.

    “Using only European tools and means, European ground infrastructure deployed on European territory, our conception, machine and design, is totally validated,” stated Faivre, referring to the recent Galileo-only positioning fix by ESA. The March 12, 2013, event marks “the end of the beginning,” and culminates 12 years of intense work at all levels of European industry.

    “Europe is at par with GPS” with performance as expected. “I hope that soon our U.S. colleagues will be jealous of our performance,” Faivre stated, implying yet again the persistent Galileo claim that the system will be more accurate than GPS. He returned to this theme with reference to Fugro’s accomplishment of real-time precise point positioning at the centimeter level.

    He acknowledged that “It’s a technological competition with the United States, Russia, and China,” even though all may be friendly and collegial.

    In that competitive light, “the success of Galileo will be measured by the number of users,” and not by the number of satellites, or the degree of accuracy, or the strength of the signal.

    Previously, the ENC audience had heard from Ingolf Schädler that “Europe has closed the gap with the technological superpowers,” in what “may be the most complex invention ever of mankind, the system of navigation that is GNSS.” He also made a proud reference to Austrian-produced signal generators aboard Galileo’s orbiting IOV satellites. Schädler is the deputy director general of innovation for the Austrian federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology.

    “We have reached cruising speed,” announced the third keynote speaker, Carlo des Dorides of the European GNSS Agency (GSA). He was referring explicitly to the re-positioning of the GSA headquarters from Brussels to Prague, but the remarks reverberated to the Galileo program as a whole.

    David Blanchard, deputy head of unit, EU Satellite Navigation Programmes for the European Commission, quoted an unnamed U.S. publication: “With the capability to make a position fix from four signal-broadcasting satellites, we can now say that Galileo has truly arrived.”

    That statement appeared in the May 2013 GPS World, an issue of the magazine that was distributed in conference bags to all attendees at the ENC.

    Blanchard then shifted the focus slightly from Galileo, to Galileo together with the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), Europe’s satellite-based augmentation service that also broadcasts GPS corrections. “We have to make sure that all the capabilities afforded by EGNOS are realized.” He also made strong references to the EGNOS Data Access Service (EDAS).

    Blanchard cited a current ongoing study that shows that 6 to 7 percent of European gross domestic product (GDP) is dependent upon GNSS.

    “A gold mine within arm’s reach of European industry” was how Gard Ueland, head of Galileo Services, characterized the present situation. “Development of European downstream market is crucial; it also has to bring more benefits to European society.” Galileo Services will host a workshop of  industry stakeholders in late October, at the OHB System premises in Bremen, Germany. Watch GPS World Events calendar and news for an announcement with specific dates.

    Having attained altitude and cruising speed, the Galileo program must now shift to warp speed to hit its goals on time: 18 satellites in orbit by the end of 2014, and a total of 26 by the end of 2015. Early services by the end of 2014, and full services in 2016. Stable, continuous services, as Blanchard emphasized.

    Better go to overdrive.

  • Report from ION ITM: Faster, Smaller, Cheaper

    And more of them!

    That’s been one of the mantras — a controversial one, granted — of technological advance in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It has succeeded in penetrating the global positioning, navigation, and timing vanguard, as evidenced by a handful of key presentations on the first day of the Institute of Navigation (ION) International Technical Meeting in San Diego on Monday.

    Skybox Imaging, a company that is “passionate about bringing Moore’s Law to space via disruptive microsatellite technology, rapid development cycles, and a scalable web-based delivery platform,” spoke to the ION ITM plenary session in the person of Ronny Votel, an engineer leading the company’s guidance, navigation and control division. Skybox’s goal is to provide “easy access to reliable and frequent high-resolution images . . . through a “constellation of imaging microsatellites delivering high-resolution imagery of any spot on Earth multiple times per day.”

    To achieve that goal, Skybox is developing a low-cost imaging satellite system:

    • design life of the satellites, 3 years;
    • size of the satellites, a mini-fridge;
    • size of the constellation, in the tens.

    Skybox will pair that flying system with web-accessible big data processing platform to capture video or images of any location on Earth within a couple of days — an unheard of delivery turnaround in the current global imaging industry, unless you happen to be a government (as in central, high, federal, perhaps military) customer.

    The low-cost nature of the satellite opens the possibility of deploying tens of satellites which, when integrated together, have the potential to image any spot on Earth within an hour. Votel several times made the analogy in his talk of using an iPhone camera to capture desired imagery, and indeed that could be a next logical step in FBC development: just throw a bunch of camera phones up into orbit.

    Skybox expects to launch its first two satellites later this year.

    In April of last year, Wired published a fascinating history and analysis: “Smaller, Quicker, Secret, Robotic: Inside America’s New Space Force.” Between Between 1992 and 1999, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched 16 faster, smaller, cheaper missions, including Mars probes and space telescopes. Ten missions succeeded; six failed. Analysts declared the initiative a failure, and to a large extent it has been forsaken. Recent public writings, though, show second thinking. “I would like to respectfully suggest that success-per-dollar is a more meaningful measurement of achievement than success per-attempt,” stated one Air Force lieutenant colonel in a treatise on program management lessons from NASA.

    Could such an approach work for GNSS satellites, some of which are burdened with extraneous non-PNT payloads that make them far from FSC? Time will tell the wiser.

    Microtechnology

    In that FSC vein, at one of the afternoon’s technical sessions, Andrei Shkel of UC-Irvine had been scheduled to deliver a paper on “Precision Navigation and Timing Enabled by Microtechnology,” but apparently something came up and he was not able to appear. I had looked forward very much to what I anticipated would be an update to his September 2011 article in GPS World, “Microtechnology Comes of Age,” which was itself an update to a plenary talk he gave at ION ITM back in 2011. For now, that article will have satisfy us.

    Other presentations in the same MEMS, atomic clock, and MicroPNT session:

    Michael Bulatowicz of Northrop Grumman talked about a DARPA-backed project, the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) gyroscope. Northrop’s development and research has shown a viable solution to producing a small (size of a U.S. quarter coin) low-power navigation grade gyro using non-vibratory technology. The company has produced two prototypes and is at work on two more. Feed the NMR gyro into Shkel’s work and who knows what you’ll get in terms of FBC PNT? Well, maybe not cheaper in the immediate future. Bulatowicz said that as an assembled device he expected its cost, at least initially, to be substantially higher than MEMS technology.

    Richard Waters of Lumedyne Technologies spoke on next-generation MEMS inertial sensors with white-noise characteristics, a new paradigm based on time-domain switching for how MEMS sensors might work. TDS inertial sensors provide some key benefits: a purely digital approach, recalibration due to bias drift is not required, output is independent of oscillator conditions. Power is low, less than 1 millwatt. The device demonstrated switch stability under static conditions to –170 db. The same TDS concept can also be applied to a mechanical gyro.

    QZSS

    In other ION ITM first-day news, H. Tokura of the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology talked about “The Possibility of Precise Automobile Navigatin using GPS/QZS and Galileo E5 Pseudoranges.” Currently, research and prototype automobile high-precision PNT is done with real-time kinematic (RTK) networks, but this has some disadvantages, as discussed in an article by authors from the University of Nottingham, UK, in the February issue of GPS World.

    Japan’s QZSS now broadcasts L5 signals. Japan has essentially leapfrogged the United States, since the L5 signals with full CNAV message is already broadcast by satellite QZSS-1. Currently, three U.S. GPS satellites are L5 CNAV-capable, but none are broadcasting such a signal.

    Tokura showed results demonstrating that pseudorange observables from L5 are basically robust enough for this task. Further investigation for L5 is required because manufacturers are still developing the tracing technique for the new L5 signal. A software-defined receiver is indicated for usage.

    Hideki Yamada of Japan’s Electronic Navigation Research Institute spoke about the possibility of using only the QZSS constellation, “in case of GPS failure,” for RTK positioning in precision ag and machine control, with 4 to 7 QZSS satellites that could be launched in a future version of the constellation. QZSS has been shown to provide 10-meter accuracy in absence of GPS; now the research looks at an RTK method.

    With only one satellite in orbit, RTK-QZSS cannot be tested in the field. The researchers simulated a fuller constellation by using QZS-1, Multifunctional Transport Satellites (MTSAT), a set of geostationary weather and aviation control satellites, and GPS signals. Using a JAVAD Alpha receiver, Trimble and NovAtel antennas, they obtained results with low multipath error (about 30 centimeters) in a Tokyo environment. Multi-epoch processing is necessary for RTK-QZSS. This solution can work well as a minimum backup system of high-precision position under relatively moderate DOP condition.

    __________________

    Living may be easy, dying may be hard. But I’m wide awake, staying up late, sending my regards.

  • Live Blogging from U.S. Joint Nav Conference

    Alan Cameron, publisher and editor, and Don Jewell, contributing editor for defense, will be blogging live from the 2012 JSDE/ION Joint Navigation Conference. The conference will be held June 12-15 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Cameron and Jewell will be blogging twice a day with all the news from the defense-oriented conference.

    Among many other matters, we’ll be taking a close-up look at NovAtel’s and L-3’s new SAASM receiver. This is a classified piee of hardware, of course, but we should be able to glean some details on this and other new defense products and services being rolled out at the exhibit accompanying the conference.

    In addition, we’ll have a top-level view of the Warfighters’ Panel on June 15. A similar session was the undisputed highlight of the GPS Partnership Council in late April, and we expect more of the same here. GPS World columnist Don Jewell is organizing this panel.

    According to organizers, JNC 2012 will be the largest U.S. military navigation conference of the year with joint service and government participation. The event will focus on technical advances in positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) with emphasis on joint development, test and support of affordable PNT systems, logistics, and integration. From an operational perspective, the conference will also focus on advances in battlefield applications of GPS, critical strengths or weaknesses of fielded navigation devices, warfighter PNT requirements and solutions, and navigation warfare.

    Watch the home page Top Story for the blogs, beginning Tuesday, June 12.

  • Brave New World of Data via the Cloud

    The frightening thing about the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the bloody awful frightening thing is the sheer amount of data talked about, enthusiastically envisioned, planned for. Planned for in the sense of throwing up business cases and wheeling and dealing new products and services for millions and billions of users that will pump vast amounts of data, countless numbers of gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes per second through the cloud.

    Not planned for in the sense of actually making provision for.  Seeing if there’s enough resource on hand. Calculating if the ecosystem will handle it.

    No, wireless carriers and everyone else involved in this industry make money on data. So let’s make, make, make, more, more, more.

    Did anyone happen to estimate the amount of bandwidth needed to upload and download all this data? Has anyone thought about what pressure it might bring on other spectrum users such as, perhaps, GNSS?

    My guess is no, and no, and we don’t care. Because we are creating the future, don’t you see?!!?

    From this brave new world sprang LightSquared, born of the ravenous need for more wireless data. It doesn’t take much time at the Mobile World Congress to see that venture as just the first very tentative probe. Armies are massed at our borders.

    I didn’t get to location as a blue-chip commodity, as promised yesterday. That will have to come tomorrow.