I think the idea was to incrementally change the data so as not to make the changes noticeable (i.e. nudge it, don’t teleport it) to the control s/w. I also would bet that our good personal friends from Russia and China would be helping out as much as possible - so it’s not just the Iranians doing the hacking. Too bad we didn’t leave a big crater and then blame it on them GPS spoofing our JDAM. Oops - sorry about that! ;-)
FRegards,
PrairieDawg
Um, gradual or not there is just no way the on board systems would not know life had suddenly turned weird :-)
Remember, there would be more than one independent system watching the drone’s progress.
Plus somewhere there was a real live human operator paying attention. The following is a very simplified way of explaining what would occur and what the drone’s systems would be reporting both to the operations base and to the redundant systems on the craft.
Hello, I’m crossing into Iran now, just tooling along everything is just fine.
Hello again, GPS says somehow I have inexplicably turned around and am heading back to base!?
Hello, I just checked inertial guidance and it says I’m still going in the right direction... WTF is going on!?
Hello again, I’m looking around and it sure looks like Iran to me! Please advise?
Hello, I’ve started a watchdog timer for self destruct, please advise if you want me to stop it!?
Hello? Hello?
LOL... as I said, this story is ridiculous.
Something tells me this drone is something other than is being reported!? Or else we have morons building our drones.
p.s. It is no great trick to design GPS equipment so that it can tell the difference between a GPS signal source in orbit where it’s supposed to be and one transmitting from someplace else.