History of the GPS Satellite
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
The US military forces launched the first GPS satellite in 1978. Since then, more then three dozens satellites have been launched on Earth’s orbit, servicing not only military and aviation forces but individual private users worldwide. In the history of the Global Positioning System, more than just one GPS satellite has been lost during launches or afterwards. Some orbiting devices expired, others required replacements for technical purposes, but but no effort was spared for making GPS usage top quality. The decoding of the satellite signal is done by a GPS device or receiver that provides the exact geographical location according to three-dimensional coordinates.
Science has made such progress that GPS satellite navigation is now incorporated in the design of smartphones. People depend more and more on GPS orientation and problems may appear if replacements do not come for the orbiting satellites that will expire in a few years. For the moment, there are funding and management issues that seem to act against the proper reconditioning of the Global Positioning System. The US Air Force is in charge of the entire GPS satellite structure, the economic difficulties put a lot of stress on the managers who lack funds to invest in reconditioning.
The average user will hardly notice if any of the 31 orbiting satellites will fail, because normally, four satellites at time on the sky are enough to provide adequate information. Sometimes information may get redundant as the same GPS receiver can get simultaneous data from six or eight satellites, which is more than necessary. In the absence of GPS satellite real-time positioning, consumers would have to start using maps all over again. The military, maritime and transportation systems would suffer most without GPS satellite reconditioning.
The European states are preparing the launch of an independent satellite navigation system in 2010 that would be an alternative to the American GPS satellite applications that are now most popular. There are other countries that have individual satellite navigation and here we can count India, China or Russia. No matter how things are sorted out in terms of policy, implementation and administration at the global level, the average user should not be seriously troubled by the different modifications that may occur in the GPS satellite system. In fact, the number of GPS users will get higher because of people’s attempt to improve the efficiency of navigation.
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When the author isn’t being tracked, she has a collection of interests in psychic readings, Seattle HCG diet, and BMW Z4 windscreen windblocker wind deflector.
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