SpatiX Positioning Service is capable of suppressing the impacts brought about by the ionosphere
Intense solar activities have triggered abnormal activation of the Earth's ionosphere, posing unprecedented challenges to global satellite positioning and navigation systems.
One of the core areas in ionospheric research is the study of ionospheric delay. SPatiX has built and operated over 6,000 ground-based augmentation stations worldwide, forming an extensive distribution network and conducting continuous observations for nearly a decade. The massive observation data, characterized by large coverage and long-term continuity, has laid a solid foundation for the research and accurate analysis of ionospheric delay.
Today, high-precision spatiotemporal services based on satellite navigation are empowering various industries—ranging from automotive autonomous driving and mobile phone lane-level navigation to agricultural plant protection operations using drones and power grid inspections. The deviations of satellite signals caused by ionospheric activity bring consequences that cannot be ignored.
A chief scientist at SPatiX stated that there have been actual cases where the flight deviation of drones reached more than 10 meters due to the impact of the ionosphere. Autonomous driving requires a positioning accuracy of 20 to 30 centimeters, yet the active ionosphere has a significant adverse impact on it.
Solar activities can be likened to the occasional "mischievous behaviors" of the Sun, this "giant celestial body". The peak of the sunspot cycle is expected to occur around 2025. As smart devices become increasingly dependent on spatiotemporal services, their requirements for the accuracy, security, and reliability of such services have also increased accordingly. It is predicted that this kind of impact will persist for at least three years along with the active cycle of solar activities.
In 2023, SpatiX launched China's first large-scale ionospheric forecasting service, which is currently capable of predicting the ionospheric activity in county-level regions for the next 3 hours to 3 days. With the help of this forecast, construction personnel engaged in engineering construction, road and bridge projects, mining, forestry, land and resources management, and topographic surveys can carry out "weather-informed operations", thereby improving work efficiency.
In addition to monitoring, SpatiX has adopted the DiT (Diffusion Transformer) architecture and integrated a number of self-developed technological innovations to build an efficient large-scale atmospheric neural network base model. This model enables more intelligent reduction of ionospheric errors and suppression of potential impacts caused by the ionosphere.