Highly accurate timing is critical for our daily lives. That’s especially true if your job is protecting our country or operating the financial and telecommunications industries, and critical infrastructures like energy and water systems. They rely on PNT—Positioning, Navigation, and Timing—technology delivered through the Global Positioning System, or GPS.
PNT is a combination of three distinct capabilities1:
- Positioning precisely determine one's location and orientation two- or three-dimensionally.
- Navigation determines the current and desired position, allowing for corrections to course to find a desired position anywhere around the world.
- Timing, the ability to acquire and maintain accurate and precise time from a standard.
Critical commercial infrastructure systems rely on robust PNT. PNT is also a defining ingredient of a military that can operate with precision across all domains: air, land, sea, space and information. That is why it is so important to modernize PNT-dependent systems and platforms to be more effective and resilient.
Yet, GPS, and the PNT information is provides, are increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing tactics. When this information is disrupted, many military and commercial operations can be desynchronized—effectively blinded.
The best solution for building a more resilient PNT are accessible to new technologies, modular in design, and cost-conscious. Tomorrow’s PNT solutions will be expected to operate on open systems architectures and be agile and interconnected.
1 Source: according to the U.S. Department of Transportation
