GPS

GPS is called Global positional system satellites which were developed for military in particular. The main purpose of GPS is to provide a reliable location and time information. This project was started in the year 1973 in order to tackle the inabilities and the limitations of the previous navigation systems. It mainly works by integrating the ideas that are gotten from number predecessors which also includes a number of classified engineering design studies from 1960s.

 The U.S Department of Defense has come up with this design and made it operational in the year 1994 which was run with 24 satellites.  There are even other systems which are used in addition to GPS. The Russian military used the Russian Navigation Satellite System and it made this system available to the civilian in 2007. Other systems that gained prominence during this time are the Galileo positioning system and the compass navigation system.

History of GPS:

Reckoning the history of GPS takes one back to the World War II in the early 1940s during which there were several systems like LORAN and the Decca Navigator were developed. Later in 1956 the test of general relativity was proposed by Friedwardt Winterberg where he used the atomic clocks in the orbit in artificial satellites.  The principle of general relativity was used in here to achieve maximum accuracy. When Russia has launched the first man-made satellite, there has been additional inspiration derived on this ground.

Awards:

GPS has acquired so many prestigious awards. In the year 1993, the GPS Team has been selected as the winner of Robert J. Collier Trophy in the year 1992. It has been considered as the most prestigious award at that time. There are researchers from, USAF, Naval Research Laboratory, Rockwell International Corporation, Aerospace Corporation and IBM. Their hard work in developing the efficient and the safest surveillance and navigation of spacecraft ever since the use of radio navigation has been appreciated. There are two GPS developers namely Ivan Getting and Bradford Parkinson who received National Academy of Engineering Charles Stark Draper Prize for the year 2003.

 Long-range radio system:

Ivan Getting has been the engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of The Aerospace Corporation. His contribution in establishing the fundamentals of the GPS has helped in improving the lad based radio system during the Second World War. This system is called as LORAN which can be expanded as Long-range Radio Aid to Navigation. On the other hand, Bradford Parkinson is a professor at the Stanford University. He specialized in aeronautics and contributed for the current satellite-based system in 1960s.

Questions:

• Who proposed the test of general relativity?
• What is LORAN?