[gps-talkusers] GPS Article from the L.A. Times

From: "Sue Sweetman" <sue.sweetman@xxxxxxx>
To: <gps-talkusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 23 May 2010 09:08:04 -0700
Kind of long, so hit Delete if you aren't interested in what's under the
hood. 

GPS is getting an $8-billion upgrade
Improvements, including the replacement of satellites, aim to make the
system more reliable, more widespread and much more accurate.
By W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times

May 23, 2010

Without it, ATMs would stop spitting out cash, Wall Street could blunder
billions of dollars in stock trades and clueless drivers would get lost.

It's GPS, and it's everywhere.

Although most people may associate the Global Positioning System with the
navigation devices that are becoming standard equipment on new cars, GPS has
become a nerve center for the 21st century rivaling the Internet - enabling
cargo companies to track shipments, guiding firefighters to hot spots and
even helping people find lost dogs.

"It's a ubiquitous utility that everybody takes for granted now," said
Bradford W. Parkinson.

He should know. Three decades ago, as a baby-faced Air Force colonel just
out of the Vietnam War, Parkinson led the Pentagon team that developed GPS
at a military base in El Segundo.

Now, scientists and engineers - including those at a sprawling
satellite-making factory in El Segundo - are developing an $8-billion GPS
upgrade that will make the system more reliable, more widespread and much
more accurate.

The new system is designed to pinpoint someone's location within an arm's
length, compared with a margin of error of 20 feet or more today. With that
kind of precision, a GPS-enabled mobile phone could guide you right to the
front steps of Starbucks, rather than somewhere on the block.

"This new system has the potential to deliver capabilities we haven't seen
yet," said Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for aerospace research firm
Teal Group. "Because GPS touches so many industries, it's hard to imagine
what industry wouldn't be affected."

The 24 satellites that make up the GPS constellation - many of them built at
the former Rockwell plant in Seal Beach - will be replaced one by one. The
first replacement was scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral this
weekend. The overhaul will take a decade and is being overseen by engineers
at Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo, where Parkinson and his team
developed the current system.

"We know that the world relies on GPS," said Col. David B. Goldstein, the
chief engineer for the upgrade.

San Diego found out firsthand in 2007, when the Navy accidentally jammed GPS
signals in the area, knocking out cellphone service and a hospital's
emergency hospital paging system for doctors. New York experienced a similar
problem a year later.

The upgrade is designed in part to prevent such outages by increasing the
number of signals beamed to Earth from satellites that orbit 12,000 miles
above. By triangulating the signals from four satellites, GPS receivers -
and there are now more than a billion of them - can pinpoint your location
on the ground.

Although "positioning" is an obvious application of the technology, it's
also become a crucial timekeeper for the financial industry. Transactions
made everywhere, from ATMs to Wall Street stock trades, are time-stamped
using precise atomic clocks ticking within the GPS satellites. The clocks
are accurate to one-billionth of a second. It's a crucial technology for
Wall Street, where a fraction of a second could mean billions of dollars.

Before GPS, explorers and seafarers figured out where they were by looking
at the sun and the stars. Even with the advent of gyroscopes and radios,
navigation was still imprecise, with an average margin of error of a mile or
two.

The Cold War sparked the necessity for something better.

When the Soviet Union launched the world's first orbiting satellite,
Sputnik, in 1957, scientists at Johns Hopkins University scrambled to track
it. They soon realized they could determine Sputnik's position by monitoring
the radio waves it emitted.

That led to a breakthrough concept. If radio waves could be used to track a
satellite from Earth, the radio waves from the satellite could also be used
to determine the position of an object on the ground.

The Pentagon jumped at the idea. The Navy in particular needed help guiding
its submarines that carried nuclear missiles. Because the submarines spent
months underwater and only surfaced sporadically, they did not have a
precise way of knowing where they were, which diminished the accuracy of the
missiles.

In the 1960s, the Pentagon launched more than a dozen satellites under a
program called Transit to help the submarines, which were outfitted with an
antenna that could receive satellite signals when they surfaced.

But the system was accurate only to within 100 feet - and only when a
submarine wasn't moving. The government needed something better.

That's where Parkinson came in. In 1972, the Pentagon tapped him to develop
a satellite-based navigation system that had more naysayers than supporters.
Parkinson recalled frequent trips to Washington to deflect criticism from
politicians and even some Pentagon brass that decried the project as a waste
of taxpayers' money.

"I was told that the system was useless and that it had no future," said
Parkinson, 75, who is now professor emeritus at Stanford University. "I
guess we proved them wrong."

In addition to Rockwell, Parkinson enlisted engineers at Aerospace Corp.,
also in El Segundo. The first satellite was launched in 1978 and the system
began partially operating with 21 satellites in 1993.

The military seized on the technology quickly, using GPS to guide troops
through sand storms during the first Gulf War. A few years later, in 1995,
GPS became a household name after Air Force Capt. Scott F. O'Grady used his
hand-held unit to guide rescuers to his position after his jet was shot down
over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Since then, GPS has revolutionized warfare. GPS is used to direct the drones
seeking out insurgents in Afghanistan, and has made "smart bombs" so
accurate that they can be dropped from 40,000 feet and still land within 10
feet of their target.

The Pentagon operates and controls the GPS satellite system used in every
country around the world. Until 2000 it deliberately degraded the signals
that could be read by civilian devices. Commercial applications soared in
2000, when President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to stop making the
signals fuzzy.

Worried that the U.S. could flip the switch and shut off GPS to the rest of
the world, several countries are developing their own satellites to wean
themselves from relying on technology controlled by the U.S. military. The
European Union, China and Russia are spending billions of dollars to develop
their own versions.

Commercial applications, meanwhile, continue to multiply.

NavCom Technology Inc. in Torrance makes a remote-control system for
tractors that steers by GPS. The company refines GPS signals with other
ground-based navigation devices so that farmers can watch their tractors
plant seeds in straight rows without overlapping in their fields.

Oil riggers pay a monthly subscription for a GPS service that enables them
to zero in on oil fields that lay thousands of feet below the surface on the
ocean floor.

The number of users who subscribe to such services is expected to balloon to
at least 15 million this year, up from 100,000 six years ago, according to
Frost & Sullivan, a San Antonio research firm.

"That's not including the hundreds of millions of people who get the signals
for free on applications through their cellphones," said Daniel Longfield,
industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

Under the $8-billion upgrade, Boeing Co.'s Space and Intelligence Systems in
El Segundo is building 12 satellites the size of sport-utility vehicles, and
18 others will be assembled by Lockheed Martin Corp. in Denver. Twenty-four
will go into orbit and six will be reserved as spares.

The first phase is more than three years behind schedule, costing taxpayers
about $1 billion. Much of the delay has been blamed on Air Force demands for
new features, including the ability to upgrade the satellites' software
while they are in space.

The new satellites will also triple the amount of signals available for
commercial use and will have atomic clocks that are even more precise -
keeping time to a fraction of a billionth of a second.

"GPS has truly become the lighthouse of the world," Parkinson said. "It's
just remarkable how the system has evolved over the past 30 years. It'll be
just as interesting to see what will come in the next 30."

william.hennigan@xxxxxxxxxxx

Copyright C 2010, The Los Angeles Times

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[gps-talkusers] GPS Article from the L.A. Times

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