The conflict-driven jamming that has dogged flights and shipping across Europe for years also reaches spacecraft. Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have traced it into low Earth orbit, where it degrades the navigation fixes satellites rely on.
The team at DTU Space built a free online map called SAT-JAM from publicly available navigation data. It shows where spacecraft between roughly 400 and 600 kilometers up lose positioning, and the pattern leans heavily on eastern Europe with further disruption across the continent and parts of Southeast Asia. A ground-based source capable of covering the region would fit that geography, the scientists say.
Kian Bostani Nezhad, a PhD student at DTU Space and the Centre for Security DTU, led the mapping effort and is lead author of a paper presented at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference 2026. Jamming is usually filed under aviation and shipping problems, he said, and few people picture it reaching orbit even though operators notice it in their own telemetry.
Low-orbiting satellites fix their position using signals from much higher constellations, chiefly GPS and Galileo. Those signals arrive already faint, and with no topography, buildings or vegetation in the way, a ground transmitter needs far less power to drown them out. The skill for operators is that the tool records interference felt by spacecraft over a map of Earth, not the identity of the transmitter.
The cost shows up downstream: an Earth observation satellite that cannot pin its position cannot certify where a picture was taken, and a communications spacecraft that drifts loses antenna pointing.
DTU is careful about limits. SAT-JAM, built on Copernicus Sentinel data and updated as observations arrive, shows where interference is felt, not who transmits it or whether it is deliberate.
