201201 January/February 2012 Archives - Inside GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design

201201 January/February 2012

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SIDEBAR: GNSS Attitude Determination on the Fly

Return to main article: "Winging It"

GNSS technology is used in various ways to find attitude or tra­jectory. The simplest method relies on measuring the velocity of a single receiver and interpreting the direction of that vector as the vehicle’s heading.

This works for applications where a vehicle’s motion is con­strained to only one axis – either absolutely, as with a train, or in the typical case of a car — when being driven responsibly!

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By Inside GNSS

SIDEBAR: In-Office Data Processing and Analysis

Return to main article: "Winging It"

With high-quality data sets obtained in the foot-to-foot configu­ration, we set about on postprocessing the data to extract more information about the NovAtel wingsuit system’s performance in the free-fall environment.

This was a multi-step process involving several NovAtel utilities and techniques, which we will describe here.

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By Inside GNSS
January 19, 2012

GNSS Hotspots | January 2012

One of 12 magnetograms recorded at Greenwich Observatory during the Great Geomagnetic Storm of 1859
1996 soccer game in the Midwest, (Rick Dikeman image)
Nouméa ground station after the flood
A pencil and a coffee cup show the size of NASA’s teeny tiny PhoneSat
Bonus Hotspot: Naro Tartaruga AUV
Pacific lamprey spawning (photo by Jeremy Monroe, Fresh Waters Illustrated)
“Return of the Bucentaurn to the Molo on Ascension Day”, by (Giovanni Antonio Canal) Canaletto
The U.S. Naval Observatory Alternate Master Clock at 2nd Space Operations Squadron, Schriever AFB in Colorado. This photo was taken in January, 2006 during the addition of a leap second. The USNO master clocks control GPS timing. They are accurate to within one second every 20 million years (Satellites are so picky! Humans, on the other hand, just want to know if we’re too late for lunch) USAF photo by A1C Jason Ridder.
Detail of Compass/ BeiDou2 system diagram
Hotspot 6: Beluga A300 600ST

1. ICE BREAKER
Nome, Alaska USA

√ Two 2 1/2 pound GPS-guided UAVs that tolerate extreme cold helped bring fuel to snowbound Nome, Alaska over two weeks in January. On daily photographic missions, the Aeryon Scouts helped University of Fairbanks researchers map ice thickness in the frozen harbor so a Coast Guard icebreaker could slowly guide a Russian fuel tanker close enough to pump the fuel to shore.

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By Inside GNSS

GPS – The DoD’s Profit Center

Why Washington continues to talk about deficits while the country is talking about jobs and foreclosures is kind of a mystery, but let’s play along.

Following the failure of Congress’s would-be budget-cutting committee that wasn’t so super, the Department of Defense is facing about $500 billion in mandatory cuts over the next 10 years.

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By Dee Ann Divis
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