The European Union has begun delaying the release of satellite images showing shipping lanes near the Strait of Hormuz by 24 hours. The move comes in response to an earlier US government request and coincides with the Trump administration ramping up the war with Iran once again.

The unusual change in the free and open data policy for Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program was revealed by Space News, which reviewed a copy of the decision made by the Council of the EU on July 13. The ordered delay applies to images taken by Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites and covers the Gulf of Oman region that includes shipping lanes leading to and from the contested Strait of Hormuz.

The US government first requested that the European Union restrict Copernicus satellite imagery on May 26, according to the decision document seen by Space News. That request occurred during a shaky ceasefire period for the war that began on April 8 and ended on July 8, when the US military resumed a broader campaign of military strikes following an announcement by President Donald Trump.

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As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year.

The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to “initial operational capability” for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day.

FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million.

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New navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit could provide 100 times stronger signal strength compared to GPS and other global navigation satellite systems operating from higher orbital altitudes—enabling greater location accuracy within dense cities, under thick foliage, and even inside buildings. Such signals would also likely prove more resilient to interference at a time when commercial flights, maritime shipping, and even various smartphone apps face increasingly widespread disruption from GPS jamming.

That vision may start to take shape when the first six production satellites of California-based Xona Space Systems are scheduled to launch in October 2026, with early service starting in 2027. Once the full constellation of 258 Pulsar satellites has been launched in the following years, Xona claims that customers will be able to accurately pinpoint their locations anywhere on Earth to within several centimeters.

“That added power means that we can get into that indoor environment that GPS can't get to today,” Adrien Perkins, co-founder and VP of engineering at Xona Space Systems, told Ars. “Our higher power allows you to get into those jamming environments a lot further than you would with GPS by itself.”

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Russian satellites have been identified as the cause of mysterious, seconds-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe—a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space. But uncertainty still hangs over whether such interference is intentional and if it could be more powerfully weaponized as GPS jamming with continental reach in the future.

The discovery came from an investigation detailed in a June 2 preprint paper by Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements at The University of Texas at Austin, along with Argyris Kriezis at Stanford University in California. By sifting through public data from ground-based stations with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, they identified a pattern of high-powered interference lasting less than 10 seconds each time but simultaneously detectable by ground stations across Europe from Norway to Spain to Poland, and even reaching as far west as Greenland and Canada.

By analyzing the ground station data from January 2019 to April 2026, the researchers found 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event overlapping with the GPS L1 frequency band centered on 1575.42 megahertz. That represents the main band used for signal transmission by the US-made GPS satellite constellation and GNSS constellations from other countries.

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NASA satellites designed to observe cyclone wind speeds and collapsing ice sheets have also proven capable of identifying the approximate locations of GPS jammers. That could help monitor high-risk areas for aircraft and ships navigating the growing prevalence of GPS interference worldwide.

Two different NASA satellite systems showed how they could locate a known but mysterious GPS jammer within several kilometers of its position in Iran, according to an experiment by Sean Gorman, CEO and cofounder of the location-based technology company Zephr.xyz that was detailed in the magazine GPS World. Such jammers use strong signals to overpower the weaker radio signals coming from US-operated GPS satellites and other global navigation satellite systems.

Such NASA satellites cannot perform “near-real time monitoring” or pinpoint the exact location of GPS jammers, said Clara Chew, principal scientist and lead of the GNSS systems and data team at the California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space, who was not involved in the study. But Chew told Ars that identifying the approximate locations of GPS jammers “could potentially be helpful for flight planning” or for “indicating high risk areas for maritime shipping.”

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