World's first GPS-free quantum navigation trial succeeds at sea

“Quantum sensors can sense the tiniest of changes in the gravity or magnetic field and use a previously prepared map of these properties to determine their location. Since a quantum sensor does not need to receive or send a signal to an external device, it cannot be hacked or be spoofed by a fake incoming signal either. “ Very cool!

Two issues I have with the presentation:

A magnetic field is an external signal - the Earth’s magnetic field is actually incredibly weak…

10x better performance than GNSS … positioning accuracy of 1 nautical mile. Cheap old school handheld GPS out in the woods was accurate better than 10 feet most of the time, so what in this performance is 10x better? 10x more resistant to jamming? Seems like it should be completely impervious to jamming. 1 nm accuracy is useful, but hardly better performance.

Its better performance than existing non-gps systems - not better than GPS. For ships , being within 1nm after thousands of miles of travel is really well performing. Obvious the real play here is weaponry though, since GPS isnt reliable in warfare and on-board sensors can do the detail work of target identification once in an area, the hard part is a way for them to self navigate accurately over long distances without GPS.

The realer play is submarines. You don’t get any satellite signal at all underwater. Before this it was only INS or dead reckoning.

I suspect submarines can also use bottom facing radar to track features on the sea floor. But tracking the gravity should be even better.