GPS World

Tag: National Institute of Standards and Technology

  • The billon-dollar-a-day GPS mistake?

    The billon-dollar-a-day GPS mistake?

    We all need to be careful that the numbers we are throwing around to support our case aren’t really undermining it.

    Headshot: Dana Goward
    Dana Goward, President, Resilient PNT Foundation

    Over the last several weeks, I have repeatedly heard government officials and others talking about the value of GPS to the U.S. economy.

    In each case they cited a 2019 report sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It determined that, if GPS services were to go away, the U.S. economy would lose one billion dollars a day.

    A billion dollars is a lot of money.

    Yet the U.S. annual gross domestic product is more than $22 trillion a year. That’s more than $60B a day. One billion dollars is less than 1.7%.

    That just doesn’t seem right.

    A member of the White House’s National Security Council said “GPS is still a single point of failure” for America. That sounds like a pretty big hit to the economy. Not to mention our national security.

    GPS signals are critical for networks, transportation, communications, power grid operations, first responders…virtually every critical infrastructure. If they go away, the U.S. GDP will certainly suffer much more loss than 1.7%. The economy would likely go from growing to shrinking and continue that way for quite a while.

    I don’t know exactly how much the U.S. will suffer if GPS suddenly goes away, but I am sure it will be a lot. Texas alone lost an estimated $195 billion with at least 57 dead as a result of its February 2021 week-long power crisis. Although not caused by a GPS outage, the number gives us real-world benchmarks for the impacts of a major tech infrastructure failure.

    If GPS fails, there will certainly be more accidents while people across the nation get used to it not being available. First responders will have a much harder time getting places and using land mobile radios. All kinds of essential services will be disrupted. More people will die than would have been the case otherwise.

    In December 2021, a member of the White House’s National Security Council said “GPS is still a single point of failure” for America. That sounds like a pretty big hit to the economy. Not to mention our national security.

    Pinpoint book coverIn his book “Pinpoint – How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds,” author Greg Milner asks about the value of GPS. His answer is another question. “What’s the value of oxygen?”

    The authors of the NIST-sponsored study were undoubtedly diligent. But they were faced with an impossible task – to quantify the unquantifiable. And like any analysis, they were limited in what they could do by the available time, money, and hard data. They were asked for a number. They delivered one that could be easily supported.

    A billion dollars is a lot of money. It might be a fairly impressive sound bite for general audiences.

    Government budget analysts and policy makers, though, are accustomed to dealing with dollars in the hundreds of billions and trillions. A billion a day, while not chump change, is not a major issue.

    Protecting GPS and ensuring the nation has resilient positioning, navigation and timing services are major issues.

    We all need to be careful that the numbers we are throwing around to support our case aren’t really undermining it.

    Dana A. Goward is president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation.

  • It’s about time for the electrical grid

    It’s about time for the electrical grid

    On March 24, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released information about a program designed to provide resilient timing to the electrical grid by fiber.

    The Center for Alternative Synchronization and Timing (CAST) is located at and led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and has been underway for almost two years.

    More than just an academic center for research, CAST is building a network of atomic master clocks and methods of time delivery by fiber that will ensure power grids always have failsafe and resilient time.

    Timing is essential to a wide variety of equipment and network functions essential to electrical grids. Most of these use time signals that come directly from, or can be traced back to, signals from GPS.

    Electrical-grid timing dependent equipment and networks

    • Transmission-line fault detection
    • Frequency measurement
    • Synchrophasors/phasor measurement units
    • Internet-based market transactions
    • Substation control/resynchronization
    • Disturbance monitoring event recorders
    • Protective relays
    • Bulk metering
    • SCADA networks
    • Synchrophasor networks

    An industry expert once observed, “Electrical grids won’t fail without accurate time signals, but they are impossible to manage. And who wants an unmanageable grid?”

    According to David Wells, program leader for CAST at DOE headquarters, “It has been no secret there are vulnerabilities within the timing and synchronizations platforms used by the energy sector.” Wells said that for grid timing “a secure, verifiable, and reliable solution is paramount.”

    He sees CAST as a necessary part of tech evolution for electrical grids and service. “The sector has been going through a transition from analog to digital and then from digital to internet protocol (IP). Technologies have been bolted on, but with each bolt-on added, access vulnerabilities are added as well. Embedded stratum timing systems based through digital carriers allowed our networks to be closed-loop (zero-trust) for 50 years. During the age of IP conversion, the ability to provide timing via stratum was lost, so the sector moved to GPS and NTP, which provided precision at the locations, but lack security, validation and true wide-area synchronization.”

    CAST’s goal is to establish “true closed-loop (zero-trust) with secure bi-direction timing validation and synchronization over IP networks,” with multiple clocking sources, according to Wells. The system, he said, will be able to reach all power substations and remote locations.

    While Wells, his office and ORNL are the primary players, a whole cast of other organizations contributes to the effort. These include DOE’s Office of Electricity; its Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response; Savannah River National Laboratory; Sandia National Laboratory; and industry partners.

    CAST will not be creating new infrastructure, but rather leveraging fiber already in place. “This is not a dedicated fiber network for timing,” said Wells. “CAST uses existing fiber in the form of dark fiber (underutilized fiber), commercial fiber and optical ground wire, and works with wireless technologies to extend secure timing and synchronization to users.”

    While CAST is narrowly focused on electrical grids and fiber, some see a potential for it to be the basis of a wider national security effort.

    Marc Weiss is a timing expert and consultant who served for more than 40 years as a theoretical physicist for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “CAST could be part of the foundation of an architecture that benefits all sectors and citizens, not just power grids,” he said. “The Department of Transportation has identified the need for Americans to have access to timing signals from space, from terrestrial wireless transmitters, and via fiber to have the kind of resilience they need. So, CAST is certainly a big step in the right direction.”

    DOE’s DarkNet initiative is a joint initiative by the Office of Electricity and the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER). Additional information on DarkNet and CAST can be found at https://darknet.ornl.gov

     

  • Satelles and NIST team up on precision timing

    Satelles and NIST team up on precision timing

    Cooperative agreement expands precision timing distribution options for critical infrastructure and verifies STL’s agreement with UTC via UTC(NIST)

    This March 30, 2022, chart of Satelles and NIST testing verifies that STL timing agrees with UTC. (Chart: Satelles)
    This March 30, 2022, chart of Satelles and NIST testing verifies that STL timing agrees with UTC. (Chart: Satelles)

    Satelles Inc., provider of highly secure satellite-based time and location services, has entered a cooperative agreement with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology that directly connects STL’s operational infrastructure to the source of UTC(NIST), the national standard for time and frequency in the United States produced in coordination with the U.S. Naval Observatory.

    The agreement calls for Satelles to provide its STL service to NIST. Reciprocally, the agreement includes the introduction of a connection between an STL Ground Monitoring Station (GMS) provided by Satelles to the NIST collection of extremely accurate atomic clocks that maintains the official time scale for UTC(NIST).

    The Cooperative Agreement was described in NIST Technical Note 2187, “A Resilient Architecture for the Realization and Distribution of Coordinated Universal Time to Critical Infrastructure Systems in the United States,” published in November 2021.

    In February 2021, Satelles delivered and configured an STL GMS at NIST’s Time and Frequency Division in Boulder, Colorado. This facility is home to the ensemble of high-precision cesium beam and hydrogen maser atomic clocks that maintains UTC(NIST).

    After conducting a series of successful preliminary tests in the spring of 2021, NIST then directly connected the STL GMS to its primary clock ensemble in June 2021. Comparing timing provided by STL to UTC(NIST), the testing confirmed STL’s long-term stability of better than 25 nanoseconds with short-term time deviation of 50 nanoseconds.

    STL from Satelles is a resilient, alternative PNT service from low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that enterprise customers rely on as a primary timing source. Telecom operators, for example, use STL for 5G wireless network deployments where GPS is unavailable indoors or when other timing solutions cannot provide the required level of accuracy.

    STL’s agreement with UTC also is important for critical infrastructure and other applications that require an essential contingency capability to protect the operations of PNT-dependent systems and ensure survivability and resilience.

    “Satelles has a network of GMS nodes positioned around the world to receive STL signals and calculate the position and timing of the satellites for purposes of producing timing corrections, and
    now we are fortunate to have a GMS connected inside NIST’s main time lab,” said Gregory Gutt, president and CTO of Satelles. “It’s an honor to be given direct access to UTC(NIST), especially in an arrangement that delivers benefit to both our customers and NIST.”

    Visit satelles.com/nist for more information about NIST reports that detail the performance of STL and collaborations between Satelles and NIST.

  • ColdQuanta to develop atomic clocks for Office of Naval Research

    ColdQuanta to develop atomic clocks for Office of Naval Research

    Image: agsandrew/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images
    Image: agsandrew/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

    Next generation of atomic clocks to provide improved performance, stability and durability for U.S. Department of Defense

    ColdQuanta has been awarded a 5-year subcontract to develop portable atomic clocks for the Office of Naval Research. ColdQuanta will serve as a subcontractor to Vescent Photonics, which secured the $15.6 million total award.

    Under the Compact Rubidium Optical Clock (CROC) program, ColdQuanta will provide the physics package with development inputs from the Atomic Devices and Instrumentation Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The program began in November 2021 and will span three phases through 2026.

    As part of the CROC program, ColdQuanta and its partners will design, build and deliver a new generation of high-performance atomic clocks ready for field deployment at a high technology readiness level (TRL). Specifically, the program will interrogate a two-photon optical clock transition in a warm vapor of rubidium atoms to achieve improved stability and performance. The clocks will also offer reduced size, weight and power consumption.

    ColdQuanta is participating in the project alongside Vescent, which will provide optical frequency comb technology, and Octave Photonics and the Quantum Nanophotonics Group at NIST, which will supply crucial advances in non-linear nanophotonics. The outcome of the program will be 10 prototype field-deployable optical clocks at or above TRL 6 that exhibit long-term instability to better than three parts in 100 trillion and offer >50% reduction in power consumption.

    The CROC program will be conducted in three phases:

    • Phase 1: All critical technology elements advanced to TRL 6 and demonstrated in a modular clock.
    • Phase 2: Engineering and verification efforts to integrate the individual components into prototype clocks.
    • Phase 3: Manufacturing 10 final prototype clocks for ONR evaluation in relevant platforms.
  • TRX awarded NIST funding for NEON Personnel Tracker

    TRX awarded NIST funding for NEON Personnel Tracker

    TRX Systems was awarded funding through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program (PSIAP) to test, validate and harden the TRX NEON Personnel Tracker solution to support wide-scale public safety deployment. TRX is partnering with the Arlington County Fire Department (ACFD) to conduct extended testing during which the TRX 3D location technology will be used by all personnel at Station 5, serving Pentagon City and Crystal City, to validate usability and performance and to better align the solution with first responder needs.

    Through a previous NIST PSIAP award, TRX improved the accuracy and capabilities of its NEON Personnel Tracker solution. With this subsequent Technical and Business Assistance (TABA) award, TRX will take the next steps toward wide-scale deployment by validating and tuning the NEON solution in a challenging live environment. Combined, these projects aim to accelerate the availability of improved 3D location accuracy, easy to use 3D map data tools, and actionable 3D visualizations for first responder use cases.

    Over the course of this program, TRX will partner with ACFD to conduct an 8-month field trial that exercises the TRX NEON Personnel Tracker solution 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a fully operational environment. The key objectives of this extended deployment are to identify and close any gaps that could inhibit widescale deployment, validate usability and tracking accuracy, and demonstrate the operational feasibility and value of the solution.

    First responders typically operate in environments that are indoors, underground, or in other areas where reliable access to GPS signals is impeded. TRX’s NEON Personnel Tracker system delivers reliable and real-time 3D location in these GPS-denied environments by using patented mapping and tracking algorithms that fuse inertial sensor data to compute the user’s path and position. This solution lets on-scene and remote commanders track the real-time location of personnel during an incident, helping them to ensure the safety of their teams and improve the efficiency of their response.

  • NIST cybersecurity profile designed to safeguard critical infrastructure

    NIST cybersecurity profile designed to safeguard critical infrastructure

    NIST's new cybersecurity profile is designed to help mitigate risks to systems that use PNT data, including finance, transportation, energy and other critical infrastructure. While its scope does not include ground- or space-based PNT source signal generators and providers (such as satellites), the profile still covers a wide swath of technologies. (Image: B. Hayes/NIST)
    NIST’s new cybersecurity profile is designed to help mitigate risks to systems that use PNT data, including finance, transportation, energy and other critical infrastructure. While its scope does not include ground- or space-based PNT source signal generators and providers (such as satellites), the profile still covers a wide swath of technologies. (Image: B. Hayes/NIST)

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has drafted guidelines for applying its Cybersecurity Framework to critical technologies such as GPS that use positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) data. Part of a larger NIST effort to safeguard systems that rely on PNT data, these cybersecurity guidelines accompany NIST efforts to provide and test a resilient timekeeping signal that is independent of GPS.

    Formally titled the “Cybersecurity Profile for the Responsible Use of Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) Services (NISTIR 8323),” the new guidelines are designed to help mitigate cybersecurity risks that endanger systems important to national and economic security, including those that underpin modern finance, transportation, energy and additional economic sectors.

    The draft profile is part of NIST’s response to the Feb. 12, 2020, Executive Order on PNT. In early 2020, NIST sought public input regarding the general use of PNT data. The PNT profile will join the growing list of profiles created to help apply the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to particular economic sectors, such as manufacturing, the power grid and the maritime industry. The scope of the profile includes any system, network or other asset that uses PNT services, including systems that receive and rebroadcast PNT data.

    While its scope does not include ground- or space-based source PNT signal generators and providers (such as satellites), the profile still covers a wide swath of technologies. Partly for this reason, NIST’s Jim McCarthy said that it is intended to be a foundational set of guidelines that PNT users can customize.

    “The profile is meant to help a broad set of users address their cybersecurity needs,” said McCarthy, one of the draft’s authors. “Rather than focus on a single economic sector, we designed it to apply to all users of PNT. Agencies and companies can tailor it to their needs based on their particular cybersecurity risk and other sector-specific factors.”

    As directed by the Executive Order, the profile can help organizations accomplish four tasks:

    • identify systems that use PNT data, and/or that propagate this data based on a source signal
    • identify PNT data sources, such as a GPS signal
    • detect disturbance to and manipulation of systems that use PNT services
    • manage the risks that come with responsible use of these PNT services

    “Our premise is that there are organizations that may not realize they are using PNT data, or know how they are using it,” McCarthy said. “Part of our goal is to help them make these connections so they can protect their operations more effectively.”

    The Executive Order also delegates to the Department of Commerce the critical task of providing a source of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) that is independent of GPS. To this end, NIST also recently conducted initial tests of a special calibration service for companies, utilities or other organizations that wish to receive NIST’s version of the global time standard, UTC(NIST), through commercial fiber-optic cable.

    The service aims to provide a time reference directly traceable to UTC(NIST) with an accuracy of 1 microsecond — good enough for telecom networks, the power grid and financial markets, and thereby boosting the resilience of accurate time distribution and the infrastructure sectors and subsectors that use timing services.

    The initial link is a collaboration between NIST and OPNT, a commercial time-service provider based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. While the work was led by researchers at NIST’s Boulder, Colorado, campus, the dedicated optical fiber connects the reference time scale at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to a facility in McLean, Virginia, that will ultimately serve as the hub for East Coast distribution of timing data.

    OPNT has extended the initial fiber link to Atlanta, Georgia, about 800 kilometers from McLean. Preliminary data suggest that this link will be able to support the requirements of the Executive Order.

  • Orolia selected for NIST workshop on PNT profile development

    Orolia selected for NIST workshop on PNT profile development

    Photo: Orolia
    John Fischer. (Photo: Orolia)

    John Fischer, vice president of advanced R&D at Orolia, will join three industry leaders as a panelist in a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) workshop about the federal government’s PNT Executive Order. Fischer is a member of GPS World’s Editorial Advisory Board.

    Other workshop panelists include Michael Calabro, chief engineer at Booz Allen Hamilton; Michael J. Lewis, senior staff security strategist at Chevron; and Gerardo Trevino, technical leader in cyber security at the Electric Power Research Institute. The workshop will take place Sept. 15-16.

    The PNT Executive Order requires the development of positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) profiles to ensure that the nation’s critical infrastructure is resilient to disruptions or denial of service attacks on GPS signals and PNT data, Orolia said.

    NIST, the organization hosting the workshop, is working to provide a ybersecurity framework-based profile to promote the responsible use of PNT services and help critical infrastructure owners make risk-informed decisions to protect their systems.

    NIST is also seeking feedback on the Cybersecurity Profile for the Responsible User of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Services Draft Annotated Outline, which can be viewed here.

    Register for the workshop here. Registration closes Sept. 11.

  • OGC calls for proposals for Indoor Mapping and Navigation Pilot Initiative

    The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has released a call for participation to solicit proposals for the its Indoor Mapping and Navigation Pilot Initiative.

    According to OGC, the Indoor Mapping and Navigation Pilot Initiative, sponsored by the Public Safety Communications Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), will create and advance solutions to complex geospatial challenges related to indoor mapping and navigation for first responders.

    First responders typically survey high-risk facilities in their jurisdiction at least once per year as part of a preplanning process. The preplanning process can be time-consuming and inefficient, according to OGC, so the Public Safety Communications Research Division of the NIST Communications Technology Laboratory has identified mobile 3D light detection and ranging (lidar) as a potentially transformational technology for first responders. Using lidar and 360-degree camera imagery coupled with advanced software processing, first responders could efficiently capture 3D point clouds and a wealth of other information, both observed and derived, while walking through buildings as part of their routine preplanning operations, OGC said.

    In addition to creating point clouds for visualization and mapping, 3D lidar can be used in localization, object classification, integration with virtual/augmented reality solutions, change detection and more. OGC’s Pilot Initiative will call upon a diverse array of leading organizations in the field and leverage standardized, open GIS frameworks, data models and data exchange formats to stimulate the rapid generation of prototypes and demonstrations for these activities.

    According to OGC, best practices and lessons learned from the Pilot Initiative shall be captured in engineering reports or other means and, where appropriate, forwarded to the respective standards committees under the OGC and International Standards Organization for consideration.

    Participation is only open to OGC members; however, proposals from non-members will be considered provided that a completed application for OGC membership (or a letter of intent to become a member) is submitted prior to (or with) the proposal.

  • NIST explores timing alternatives for smart grids

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a 33-page special publication reporting on the results of a workshop convened to recommend research and development priorities for alternatives to GPS time distribution in electrical power systems.

    “If timing is to become mission critical, redundant means of distributing timing information is essential,” according to NIST.

    NIST hosted the “Time Distribution Alternatives for the Smart Grid Workshop” at its Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus on March 21. The information gained will inform future NIST, U.S. Department of Energy, national laboratories and private sector technical programs and strategic planning.

    The workshop consisted of experts on both electrical power and wide-area time distribution. The experts came from industry, utilities, academia and government.

    The findings cover desired future characteristics, targets, challenges and barriers to adoption of time distribution alternatives; and priority R&D areas for time distribution alternatives.

    Potential alternatives to wide area distributed time synchronization include Enhanced WWVB (radio signal broadcasting), eLoran (hyperbolic radio navigation) and the IEEE Wide Area Precision Time Protocol (PTP – master slave clock synchronization).

    Results of the workshop illustrate the need for alternatives to existing GPS timing systems as well as backup systems and many of the challenges that need to be addressed to develop and implement alternatives. Some of the overarching themes that emerged include the following:

    • While a number of potential alternative exist, they will require further infrastructure, research and concerted investment to implement and demonstrate their potential to replace, supplement, back up, or fill gaps in existing GPS systems.
    • Potential alternatives may need to be combined in ensembles to fill gaps, create the needed redundancies, and supplement GPS-based timing.
    • Future alternatives to GPS will need to have the same or better levels of accuracy, resilience, security, trustworthiness, and availability to supplant existing systems; a diversity of timing distribution systems may be needed (terrestrial, communication-based, wireless, etc.).
    • Dependency on space-based systems is currently strong due to their perceived reliability; there is limited awareness of the possible adverse impacts of timing failure events in such systems (and few backups exist).
    • Developing and using existing alternatives and new technologies, and integrating these with legacy systems will require standards and use cases to enable new technology, architectures, and interoperability among systems.
    • Better understanding of attack and failure threat modes is needed to estimate and demonstrate the true consequences of timing failures in systems based entirely on GPS.