Pentagon Sees Quantum Computing as Key Weapon for War in Space

July 19th, 2018

Disclosure: I am long Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL).

I had not heard of quantum technologies being applied to inertial navigation systems before.

Check out this 2014 piece from New Scientist:

IN 2016 a British submarine will slip its moorings and set sail under the guidance of the quantum world. The navigation system it will be testing should record the vessel’s position with 1000 times more accuracy than anything before.

If successful, the system, known as quantum positioning, could be miniaturised for use in aircraft, trains, cars and even cellphones. This would provide a backup navigation tool in cities’ concrete canyons, or in autonomous vehicles, where a loss of GPS signal can be dangerous.

GPS doesn’t work underwater, so submarines navigate using accelerometers to register every twist and turn of a vessel after it submerges and loses its last positioning fix. But this isn’t very accurate.

“Today, if a submarine goes a day without a GPS fix we’ll have a navigation drift of the order of a kilometre when it surfaces,” says Neil Stansfield at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down. “A quantum accelerometer will reduce that to just 1 metre.”

To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield’s team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force – and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.

The DSTL team wants this set-up to be usable in the real-world setting of a submarine, where the size of the force would correspond to the movements as the sub swings around in the sea.

And more recently: ‘Quantum radio’ may aid communications and mapping indoors, underground and underwater.

Via: SpaceNews:

Top Pentagon official Michael Griffin sat down a few weeks ago with Air Force scientists at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to discuss the future of quantum computing in the U.S. military. Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has listed quantum computers and related applications among the Pentagon’s must-do R&D investments.

Quantum computing is one area where the Pentagon worries that it is playing catchup while China continues to leap ahead. The technology is being developed for many civilian applications and the military sees it as potentially game-changing for information and space warfare.

Artificial intelligence algorithms, highly secure encryption for communications satellites and accurate navigation that does not require GPS signals are some of the most coveted capabilities that would be aided by quantum computing.

Quantum clocks are viewed as a viable alternative to GPS in scenarios that require perfect synchronization across multiple weapons systems and aircraft, for example, said Hayduk. “We’re looking at GPS-like precision in denied environments,” he said. “It often takes several updates to GPS throughout the day to synchronize platforms. We want to be able to move past that so if we are in a denied environment we can still stay synchronized.”

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