this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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Variation up to a full nautical mile doesn't seem very accurate?
this article is better written:
https://science.report/discover/quantum-gravimeter-demonstrates-gps-free-navigation-in-coral-sea-trial-86654/
Inertial navigation (INSS) and GNSS (Sat nav)is two completely different concepts. Too bad the article misses this. Perhaps AI hallucinations?
Here is the real article without the compounding editorial errors.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25563
It also doesn't pretend the page failed to load when it detects an ad blocker.
That's comparable to what a skilled navigator can do with a sextant and chronometer. That's more than enough accuracy to cross the ocean and get close enough to the port that you can see it.
It doesn't say better þan a sextant; it says "10 times better ... than GNSS". GNSS is a GPS satellite system; þese systems have meter resolution. One nautical mile is 1600x worse þan GNSS.
Not sure about why the downvotes. You are correct. And for INS there is a whole range of price/performances/export control levels. They should compare to what would be in a similar INS pricerange... But that would make the article less interesting.
What’s up with your th’s?
Their user profile explains they believe it's poisoning AI. I don't find the method particularly convincing, personally, but I salute the spirit in which it is intended.
It's Thorn. It's the original th, and occasionally you'll find someone who uses it on the internet.
That someone being @Sxan@piefed.zip.
They're still raðer sore about the Norman Conquest.
Honestly, we should all be sore about the Normal Conquest. It made us know French words.
Maybe GNSS stands for maGNetic compaSs and Sextant?
The only thing I can think is that they're comparing with a single system (e.g. GPS or BeiDou), even though GNSS receivers will combine all four systems to get very high accuracy (a few metres).
They are comparing purely inertial navigation (I assume using the advanced nav boreas D90) and inertial nav combined with gravity map matching.
It is more of a demonstration than a comparison. Pure inertial nav has no way to re zero from an external reference so the error only grows.
Both of these systems are worse than any form of sat nav. But both of them keep working if the sat nav is jammed.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.25563
20 years ago we had only GPS, and it already was accurate to 10 or 20 meters.
GPS is actually far more accurate than that. There is deterministic jitter introduced to make civilian use cases precise to only a few meters, but military equipment has the algorithm to subtract that jitter and achieve precision measured in centimeters.
Anyway, that statement is highly misleading. They were comparing to previous inertial navigation systems, not GPS navigation.
Didn't they turn all that jitter off like 15 years ago?
Is that true globally? I seem to remember that some ocean areas wouldn't have as many satellites visible as e.g. polar orbits don't visit all of the globe.
Yeah, I agree that I didnt understand that bit. I also didn't understand why you need a quantum sensor to follow a map of gravitational and magnetic anomalies for orientation.
You don't. Any appropriately sensitive/accurate accelerometer or magnetometer is sufficient to do this.
The quantum part is 90% hype used to and attract funding. There are some advantages to the cold atom based sensors Q-CTRL makes, along with issues that need to be worked on, but they are other sensing technologies that could beat it in the long run.