Millions of Phones Could Map the Earth’s Ionosphere

We are all familiar with the atmosphere of the Earth and part of this, the ionosphere, is a layer of weakly ionized plasma. It extends from 50 to 1,500 km above the planet. It’s a diffuse layer but sufficient to interfere with satellite communications and navigation systems too. A team of researchers have come up with an intriguing idea to utilise millions of mobile phones to help map the ionosphere by relying on their GPS antennas.

The ionosphere is a layer of the Earth’s atmosphere where radiation ionizes atoms and molecules. The incoming solar radiation is the primary cause which energises gases causing them to lose electrons and become electrically charged. The process creates a region of charged particles or ions known as plasma. The ionosphere is a key part of radio communications since its ionized particles reflect and refract radio waves back to Earth facilitating long distance communication. It’s density and surprisingly perhaps its composition changes as solar activity waxes and wanes. 

In a paper recently published in Nature, a team of researchers at Google have used data from over 40 million mobile phones to map conditions in the ionosphere. The concept of using crowdsourced signals is an intriguing one and the study will help to improve satellite navigation and our understanding of the upper regions of our atmosphere. We still don’t have a full understanding of the properties of the ionosphere across regions like Africa and South America so this study will fill significant gaps. 

The ionosphere can slow down radio signals that travel to Earth from satellites, in particular from GPS and other navigation satellites. When it comes to these navigation signals, they rely heavily upon signal timing and relies upon nano-second precision. This gives systems the ability to pinpoint location with incredible accuracy, having an accurate model of the ionosphere is key to its success however.

Using data from ground based stations, engineers can create real time maps of the ionospheric density. To do this, data is received across two different frequencies from the same satellite and their arrival timed. Dependent on the density of the ionosphere, the low frequency waves are slowed down more than the high frequency signals. Not taking these into account could put GPS and navigation systems out by 5 metres or more. 

Receiving multiple frequencies is within the capability of most mobile phones and it’s using this that has been the focus of the study. There is however, a degree of noise in the data received by mobile phones but the team at Google found that combining the signal of large numbers of phones reduced the noise. 

The study is currently only working with Android phones. Anyone who allows for their sensor data to be shared was able to contribute to the study. The data has already revealed plasma in the ionosphere over South America that had not been seen before.

Source : Mapping the ionosphere with millions of phones