For years, GPS receivers scattered across Europe — from Svalbard to Spain — kept registering the same brief, total signal blackout at the exact same instant, in bursts of three to five seconds. A new Veritasium video walks through how GPS expert Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements tracked the source. The interference was far too widespread to come from any ground transmitter; the geometry put it at least 1,200 kilometers up.
Months of dead ends ended when raw recordings from stations in Amsterdam and Trondheim let the pair time the signal's arrival to within five meters and finger a single culprit: Cosmos 2546, a Russian satellite in the country's missile-warning constellation. The events clustered during weekday business hours, which convinced them that a human was behind it.
Humphreys described the search as "a mystery novel here where you're trying to figure out whether it was the butler in the kitchen with the crowbar." He now leans toward "a periodic test of a capability that would be very damaging if it was deployed in anger."
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