Although the duration of the interference did not exceed ten seconds, this is the first known case of this kind. Usually, satellites do not have enough power to generate radio signals of the strength needed for such interference.
Researchers from the United States analyzed publicly available data from GPS ground stations around the world. They found that stations ranging from Norway in the north to Spain in the south, and from Greenland and northeastern Canada in the west to Poland in the east were experiencing strange simultaneous interference lasting up to 10 seconds.
The source of the interference was a signal with a frequency of 1575.42 megahertz. They most often occurred from Tuesday to Thursday, during business hours in Western Europe.
The physics of radio signals allows such interference if their sources are on Earth and distributed throughout this region, or if their source is in space. After analyzing the interference distribution, the authors of the paper, which was posted on the Cornell University preprint server, concluded that the source of the interference was in space, at an altitude of at least 1,200 kilometers.
In 2025-2026, the authors enlisted the help of other researchers to obtain a recording of the signal that creates this interference. Due to the difference in the time of arrival of the signal at different points of its reception, they were able to clarify the area of the source of interference with errors of only a few meters. It turned out that there was only one source — the Russian satellite Kosmos-2546, launched into orbit on May 22, 2020. It is one of the six satellites of the Russian nuclear missile warning system. All of them use a specific "Lightning" type orbit.
Most of the time, satellites in such an orbit are located tens of thousands of kilometers from Earth, which allows them to see the northern hemisphere well.
Having checked the data on these six satellites in the past, for the period up to 2019, the authors of the work found out that every time such interference occurred, at least one of the six satellites was over the mentioned part of the world.
One of the authors of the work in a YouTube video made a speculative assumption that this was Russia testing new capabilities to distort the GPS signal from space. He believes that so far we are talking only about testing: the interference signal was at a frequency very close to the GPS signal, but still slightly different. If you turn it on exactly at this frequency, the jamming will be more complete. In his opinion, the testing nature of the incident is also indicated by the fact that the weaker signal from the same satellites was on the frequency of BeiDou, the Chinese satellite navigation system.
Not everyone agrees with this point of view. Some industry experts have suggested that Russian satellites simply transmit messages to Earth at this frequency. However, in this case, their choice is difficult to understand. Transmitting messages at a frequency very close to the GPS signal means that it will already interfere with Russian satellites.
Other experts noted that missile attack warning satellites are a valuable asset that should monitor US ballistic missile launches. It is unclear why they should be distracted by a less important goal in the form of a GPS system.
A typical satellite at altitudes of thousands of kilometers in our era cannot effectively interfere with satellite navigation, because its available power is not that great. But Tundra-type satellites have different missile attack detection systems: the power of their onboard systems is higher than usual.
