Celestial Global Positioning System Anti-Spoofing

Project goal: To design, build and test a celestial GPS antispoofing system to detect whether a satellite GPS signal has been spoofed. The system must perform at night in an ocean environment without communication to off-board systems in order to avoid providing potentially biased results to the operator. The antispoofing system uses images from an on-board camera, celestial mapping software,and image comparison software. All components, including a microprocessor to store the software, are housed in a custom waterproof case that can be mounted to the sponsor’s autonomous aquatic rescue craft, EMILY, which stands for Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard. The celestial mapping software produces an image of the celestial bodies that should appear overhead for a given time and location, while the image processor makes a comparison with the predicted celestial map to detect the presence of spoofing. Test images of the night sky were captured over several months and a variety of weather conditions, and used as tools for the development and functional validation of the image processing software.