> “You can’t spoof gravity without literally moving a mountain,” said Biercuk.

What about weather conditions? Clouds, heavy rain, hurricanes, etc.

Relevant if you're trying to do extremely fine gravity measurements, but for navigation (and with the performance of these sensors), it's not going register much, the natural contours of earth's gravity over longer distances are large compared to these effects.

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XorNot a day ago | parent [-]

Though the more interesting part is that with such sensitivity you would likely be able to infer nearby masses moving around - shipsnor stealth planes for example.

	▲	rcxdude a day ago \| parent [-]
		Difficult to do over any significant range: gravity drops off with 1/r^2, gravity gradient like what they seem to be using here (easier to measure while in motion) drops off with 1/r^3. The variations in the earth are due to fairly large density variations in massive sections of the crust, and a ship and especially an aircraft is absolutely miniscule in comparison, even if the density contrast is higher.

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kklisura a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure about weather conditions. What about magma flows?

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bravesoul2 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Moon too (but that is predictable)