How do you acquire a large number of information concerning the ionosphere? Smartly, you should use sounding rockets or specialised equipment. Or perhaps you’ll simply conscript an enormous selection of cellphones. That was once the means taken through Google researchers in a contemporary paper in Nature.
The speculation is that GPS and an identical navigation satellites measure transit time of the satellite tv for pc sign, however the ionosphere alters the propagation of the ones indicators. If truth be told, this impact is without doubt one of the primary assets of error in GPS navigation. Maximum receivers have an 8-parameter fashion of the ionosphere that reduces that error through about 50%.
Then again, through measuring the adaptation in time between indicators of various frequencies, the telephone can estimate the entire electron present (TEC) of the ionosphere between the receiver and the satellite tv for pc. This calls for a dual-frequency receiver, after all.
This isn’t a brand new thought. There are numerous fixed-position stations that make this dimension to give a contribution to a global database. Then again, the kind of 9,000 stations can’t compete with cellphones in all places. The paper outlines how Android smartphones can do calculations at the GPS propagation delays to file the TEC numbers.
Hams steadily learn about the ionosphere. So do sounding rockets.
