While satellite-based global navigation systems have become essential tools in our daily lives, their effectiveness is often hampered by the fact that the signals cannot be accessed in underground, indoor, or underwater environments. Recently, a novel navigation system has been invented to address this issue by utilizing the characteristics of the ubiquitous and highly penetrative cosmic-ray muons. This technique, muometric navigation, does not require active signal generation and enables positioning in the aforementioned environments within a reference coordinate defined by the three-dimensional positions of multiple detectors. In its first phase of development, these reference detectors had to be connected to the receivers via a wired configuration to guarantee precise time synchronization. This work describes more versatile, wireless muometric navigation system (MuWNS), which was designed in conjunction with a cost-effective, crystal-oscillator-based grandmaster clock and a performance evaluation is reported for shallow underground/indoor, deep underground and undersea environments. It was confirmed that MuWNS offers a navigation quality almost equivalent to aboveground GPS-based handheld navigation by determining the distance between the reference frame and the receivers within a precision range between 1 and 10 m.
While satellite-based global navigation systems have become essential tools in our daily lives, their effectiveness is often hampered by the fact that the signals cannot be accessed in underground, indoor, or underwater environments. Recently, a novel navigation system has been invented to address this issue by utilizing the characteristics of the ubiquitous and highly penetrative cosmic-ray muons.
The digital Through-The-Earth (TTE) communication system can be used to provide communications links from the surface to below-ground locations. The system can be used to provide real-time monitoring of equipment sensors. The TTE communication uses very low frequency (VLF) transmission (transmission is usually done with magnetic induction, at frequencies below 30 kHz) to provide reliable data links through environments surrounded by rock, but this system in turn severely limits the bandwidth available for information transmission with data rates ranging from 9 bps to 1 kpbs43. However, since both reference and receiver detectors have their own clock, the information that would have to be transferred to the counterpart detector to be effective is just n and t. Therefore, this data rate is sufficient for MuWNS communication requirements.
2·1 year ago