TECH

US Space Force is testing satellite jammers

Satellites play a strategically important role in the wars and conflicts that occur in the world. The US space force recently conducted an exercise in which they tried to jam signals to and from satellites.

The US Space Force, United States Space Force (USSF), has been part of the United States military since 2019 and focuses on missions in space. The USSF is part of the United States Department of the Air Force and a separate defense branch alongside the Air Force.

Recently, the space force conducted a training mission called Black Skies to practice jamming satellite signals. Other countries, such as China and Russia, already have this technology in use. The exercise is the first in a series to provide the US defense with electronic warfare capabilities.

Satellite jamming is an attack that interrupts and blocks signals to and from Earth-orbiting satellites without destroying the satellites themselves. The US military exercise included signal jamming of communications to and from satellites contracted by private companies.

Satellites play an important role in the war...In the ongoing war in Ukraine, Russia attacked various infrastructures in Ukraine. According to the USSF Russia also targets the US-owned Navstar satellite system used to provide GPS data. Satellites play an important role in modern warfare and are used, among other things, for navigation and troop coordination.

Navstar consists of 24 main satellites that circle the Earth in 12 hours. Satellites are synchronized in time, and as they move in different directions, a user receives signals from them at slightly different times. If, for example, a cell phone is accessible by at least four satellites, its position can be calculated from the time differences.

Navstar GPS data is used by many countries around the world. Russia, on the other hand, has its own independent system called Glonass. The Russian satellite system has a greater tilt than Navstar which slightly improves coverage in northern latitudes. A satellite's tilt or orbital tilt is the angle between the orbit and the Earth's equatorial plane.

Russia has blocked satellite signals in Ukraine since 2014...According to a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Russia has been actively trying to block GPS signals in Ukraine since 2014, when the Crimean peninsula was invaded. Equipment to block satellite signals, believed to be on large trucks that was seen in satellite imagery, was taken away when troops rallied outside the Ukrainian border ahead of the invasion on February 24 this year.

The Navstar, which the Russian army is focused on disrupting, uses radio frequencies typical of GPS receivers in cars or cell phones. One possible way to circumvent interference may be to vary or broaden the frequency bands used by satellites.

A typical satellite jammer works by a very large radio transmitter or satellite dish sending out its own radio signals that act as noise. If radio signals hit the right frequency, satellite signals can be interfered with enough to be difficult to read.

In 2007, China blew up a weather satellite...Another way to stop satellite data is to permanently destroy and blow up satellites in orbit around the Earth. On January 11, 2007, China blew up one of its own weather satellites in an anti-satellite missile test. The satellite orbiting the Earth at a distance of 865 kilometers and weighing 750 kilograms was destroyed by the missile traveling at 8 km/s straight towards the satellite.

The Chinese missile test was the first known and successful test since 1985, when the US blew up a P78-1 satellite. To destroy satellites with kinetic death vehicles, i.e. direct collisions, create large amounts of space debris and strongly affect the space environment.

Also India blew up a satellite into orbit when they tested a new missile in 2019. The Indian satellite was in a lower orbit than the Chinese one but still created a lot of space junk that posed a danger to other satellites and astronauts aboard the International Space Station ISS.

Interference from US Space Force satellites does not create any space junk, but only temporarily prevents the satellites from working. The Black Skies exercise will be followed by Red Skies and Blue Skies which will focus on orbital warfare and cyber warfare.

by Bill Burrau