GPS GPS, in full Global Positioning System, space-based radio-navigation system that broadcasts highly accurate navigation pulses to users on or near Earth. In the United States’ Navstar GPS, 24 main satellites in 6 orbits circle Earth every 12 hours. In addition, Russia maintains a constellation called GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System), and in 2007 the European Union approved financing for the launch of 30 satellites to form its own version of GPS, known as Galileo, which is projected to be fully operational by 2020.
China launched two satellites in 2000 and another in 2003 as part of a local navigation system first known as BeiDou (“Big Dipper”). In 2006 China, which had a limited participation in Galileo, announced plans to expand BeiDou to a full GPS service as the BeiDou Navigation System. In 2007 China began launching a series of second-generation satellites, known as BeiDou-2, or Compass. The constellation of 35 satellites is scheduled for completion in 2020. A GPS receiver operated by a user on Earth measures the time it takes radio signals to travel from four or more satellites to its location, calculates the distance to each satellite, and from this calculation determines the user’s longitude, latitude, and altitude.
The U.S. Department of Defense originally developed the Navstar constellation for military use, but a less precise form of the service is available free of charge to civilian users around the globe. The basic civilian service will locate a receiver within 10 metres (33 feet) of its true location, though various augmentation techniques can be used to pinpoint the location within less than 1 cm (0.4 inch). With such accuracy and the ubiquity of the service, GPS has evolved far beyond its original military purpose and 58 has created a revolution in personal and commercial navigation. Battlefield missiles and artillery projectiles use GPS signals to determine their positions and velocities, but so do the U.S. space shuttle and the International Space Station as well as commercial jetliners and private airplanes.
Ambulance fleets, family automobiles, and railroad locomotives benefit from GPS positioning, which also serves farm tractors, ocean liners, hikers, and even golfers. Many GPS receivers are no larger than a pocket calculator and are powered by disposable batteries, while GPS computer chips the size of a baby’s fingernail have been installed in wristwatches, cellular telephones, and personal digital assistants. The principle behind the unprecedented navigational capabilities of GPS is triangulation. To triangulate, a GPS receiver precisely measures the time it takes for a satellite signal to make its brief journey to Earth – less than a tenth of a second. Then it multiplies that time by the speed of a radio wave – 300,000 km (186,000 miles) per second – to obtain the corresponding distance between it and the satellite. This puts the receiver somewhere on the surface of an imaginary sphere with a radius equal to its distance from the satellite. When signals from three other satellites are similarly processed, the receiver’s built-in computer calculates the point at which all four spheres intersect, effectively determining the user’s current longitude, latitude, and altitude. (In theory, three satellites would normally provide an unambiguous three-dimensioned fix, but in practice at least four are used to offset inaccuracy in the receiver’s clock.)
In addition, the receiver calculates current velocity (speed and direction) by measuring the instantaneous Doppler effect shifts created by the combined motion of the same four satellites. Although the travel time of a satellite signal to Earth is only a fraction of a second, much can happen to it in that interval. For example, electrically charged particles in the ionosphere and density variations in the troposphere may act to slow and distort satellite signals. These influences can translate into positional errors for GPS users – a problem that can be compounded by timing errors in GPS receiver clocks.
Further errors may be introduced by relativistic time dilations, a phenomenon in which a satellite’s clock and a receiver’s clock, located in different gravitational fields and traveling at different velocities, tick at different rates. When positional information is required with pinpoint precision, users can take advantage of different GPS techniques. Differential navigation employs a stationary «base station» that sits at a known position on the ground and continuously monitors the signals being broadcast by GPS satellites in its view. It then computes and broadcasts real-time navigation corrections to nearby roving receivers. Each roving receiver, in effect, subtracts its position 59 solution from the base station’s solution, thus eliminating any statistical errors common to the two.
The U.S. Coast Guard maintains a network of such base stations and transmits corrections over radio beacons covering most of the United States. Other differential corrections are encoded within the normal broadcasts of commercial radio stations. Farmers receiving these broadcasts have been able to direct their field equipment with great accuracy, making precision farming a common term in agriculture.
Another GPS augmentation technique uses the carrier waves that convey the satellites’ navigation pulses to Earth. Because the length of the carrier wave is more than 1,000 times shorter than the basic navigation pulses, this “carrier-aided” approach, under the right circumstances, can reduce navigation errors to less than 1 cm (0.4 inch). The dramatically improved accuracy stems primarily from the shorter length and much greater numbers of carrier waves impinging on the receiver’s antenna each second. Yet another augmentation technique is known as geosynchronous overlays.
Geosynchronous overlays employ GPS payloads “piggybacked” aboard commercial communication satellites that are placed in geostationary orbit some 35,000 km (22,000 miles) above Earth. These relatively small payloads broadcast civilian C/A-code pulse trains to ground-based users. The U.S. government is enlarging the Navstar constellation with geosynchronous overlays to achieve improved coverage, accuracy, and survivability. Both the European Union and Japan are installing their own geosynchronous overlays. Notes: 1. Satellite constellation – спутниковая группировка; 2. U.S. Department of Defense – Министерство обороны США; 3. Roving receiver – передвижной приёмник; 4. Carrier wave – несущий сигнал; 5. Geosynchronous – геосинхронный 6. Geostationary orbit – геостационарная орбита. Переведи красиво