Wireless Muometric Navigation System

Abstract

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 m and 10 m.

Muography

“…where Li is the geometrical distance between the ith reference detector located at (xi, yi, zi) and the receiver detector located at (xp, yp, zp). There are two types of device configurations for muometric positioning and navigation: (A) wired positioning and navigation 4 and (B) wireless positioning and navigation 5,6 . In a wired system, since time synchronization between the reference detector and the receiver detector is a trivial problem, Eq.…”

“…In MuWNS, while the clock of the reference detector could be steered by GPS (See Figure 6A), since the persons to be navigated are likely to be in environments where GPS is unavailable (indoor/underground/underwater), the timing of the muon's arrival at the receiver detector is measured with an independent, high precision local clock located at the receiver detector 5 . Tanaka et al 6 conducted muometric navigation on the basement floor of a building with a volume of 200 x 100 x 30 m 3 . Navigation accuracy achieved by their experiment is summarized in Table 1; the main element causing accuracy problems for MuWNS in this experiment came from relatively large temporal fluctuations (up to ~50 ns) of the local clocks used for the receiver detector.…”

“…(B) Muometric positioning 4 , navigation 5,6 and timing (PNT) that includes cosmic time synchronization (CTS) 7,8 and cosmic time calibration (CTC) 9 , (C) Wireless security with a secure authentication technique that implements a muogenic cryptographic protocol called cosmic coding and transfer (COSMOCAT) 10 .…”

“…(1) strong penetration power (able to traverse up to a few kilometers of rock), (2) path lines that travel practically straight regardless of the substance traversed, (3) virtually constant flux regardless of the season or time of day, (4) ubiquitous precipitation throughout the entire planetary surface, (5) traveling at nearly the speed of light in vacuum, (6) the true random number nature of the arrival time, and (7) multiple generation near the tropopause. After neutrinos, muons are the most numerous secondary particles at sea level 11 .…”

Waves and Particles [Turnstile]

“…Now that electronics and optics have merged into photonics, what comes next? A recent article [4] published in iScience describes a navi-gation system that works based on muons. The authors report that [4] Let us know-send the editor-in-chief an e-mail!…”