Background to and applications of Navstar/GPS.
Armada International › Vol. 14 Nbr. 3, June 1990
Linked as:
Summary
Global Positioning System
See the full content of this document
Extract
Background to and applications of Navstar/GPS.
Background to and Applications of Navstar/GPS
Handover ceremonies of the first examples of new equipment to the US military are always newsworthy, but one held in September 1987 had a unique feature. As the US Air Force Space Division accepted the first production receiver for the Global Positioning System (GPS) it also received a commemorative plaque inscribed "Latitude 42 degrees 01 min 46,093 sec", Longitude 91 degrees 38 min 54.314 sec.>> According to signals received from GPS satellites, these were the exact co-ordinates of the site of the handover ceremony. Transfer this year of responsibility for the GPS spacecraft operational control ground station in Colorado from the USAF's Space Systems Division to Air Force Space Command signals the system's operational status and growing maturity. The idea of launching satellite as dedicated navaids is not new. The US Navy launched its first Transit navigation satellite in the early 1960s, and had an operational network of five spacecraft in place by 1964. Useful as this system was, it could provide fixes only for slow-moving platforms such a surface ships and the US Navy's fleet of Polaris-armed submarines, while the limit...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
