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Volume 12, No. 3 |
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Russia to Restore GLONASS?
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ITAR-TASS reported on Nov. 6, 2002, that Russia intends to resume GLONASS launches. The information was obtained from the Coordination Research and Information Center of the Russian Defense Ministry in their implementation plan for federal purpose-oriented programs for 2002–2011.
Russia plans to launch two or three booster rockets every year with each putting two or three navigation satellites into space. The satellites will first be used to ensure national security and at the same time, the Defense Ministry will be assisting the Russian Aerospace Agency in the commercial uses of the satellites. The next launch of GLONASS satellites is planned to be made with the use of a Proton-K heavy booster from the Baykonur Cosmodrome on December 25th.
In previous years, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency has cut back on launches of GLONASS satellites, which it jointly finances with the Defense Ministry, when facing a lack of sufficient funding.
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Reaching Out: A New ION Newsletter Column
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The Institute of Navigation supports numerous educational outreach activities. Some involve the national organization, some involve the local ION sections, and some simply involve ION members who reach out to their local communities with navigation-related expertise.
Beginning with this issue, the Institute of Navigation newsletter will have a new column, “Reaching Out,” which will highlight some of these activities, both to commend the work being done, and to provide ideas and encouragement to members to participate in similar activities.
“Reaching Out’s” first article (read about it on Page 5) describes an amazing project by a remarkable group of students in Idaho and their science teacher who attained national attention that began through an encounter at the ION GPS 2001 conference.
Certainly, not all outreach efforts are conducted on this scale. Nonetheless, all outreach efforts are important, and future “Reaching Out” columns will attempt to highlight both large and small projects.
Tell Us About YOUR Outreach Efforts!
While the ION may be aware of some outreach projects, we certainly do not know everything that is happening within our membership. We would like to compile a listing of past and current outreach projects by ION members or sections to place on the ION Web site. Such a listing will provide for an exchange of ideas on how to best use your navigation expertise to inspire and educate others. We need your help to make this a useful tool. If you are involved in any sort of community outreach activity, either as an individual or through an ION section, please send an e-mail to outreach@ion.org briefly describing the activity, a date (if appropriate), and a point of contact. We are interested in all activities (even small ones).
New ION Scholarship Program
At the June ION Annual meeting, the ION council voted to establish a new scholarship program. This program would enable each ION section to award a $2,500 college scholarship to a current or future college student.
Interested ION sections should send a proposal to the ION office at outreach@ion.org describing its plan for administering the project. The proposal should include the following:
- who is eligible for the scholarship (including whether or not a student can be awarded more than one scholarship in subsequent years),
- the criteria by which the applicant(s) will be judged (practice of navigation vs. research, etc.),
- the selection procedure (committee makeup, etc.), and
- an anticipated timeline. Please address your questions to John Raquet at John.Raquet@afit.edu.
Maj. John Raquet, Ph.D, is chair of the ION’s Student Awards Committee.
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From the ION President: ION GPS 2002 Unaffected by Economics
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In spite of the lagging worldwide economy, ION GPS 2002 was quite successful: attendance was just under 2000, and the number of abstracts submitted was the highest yet. In all, 329 papers were presented in six parallel tracks. The plenary session was lively—invigorated by discussion of the Galileo program and the challenges of signal compatibility and interoperability between satellite navigation systems.
We got many positive comments about Portland, Oregon, as a venue, and the fact that it was unseasonably dry that week didn’t hurt. Congratulations to General Chair Gérard Lachapelle and to Program Chair A.J. Van Dierendonck for their excellent work, including their choice of session chairs, who also did an excellent job. Karen Van Dyke, next year’s program chair, will have big shoes to fill, but she will no doubt be up to the challenge.
Student Scholarship Program
Even with the more stringent security scrutiny that visitors from outside the United States had to deal with, international attendance was as high as ever. There was some fallout—unfortunately, four students who qualified for travel grants could not make it due to visa problems.
The satellite division provides travel grants to students whose papers are selected for presentation. The grants include airfare, hotel accommodations, registration, and a stipend. These papers are frequently among the best at the conference and often win the session awards.
The student program is just one of many innovations developed by the ION Satellite Division, whose outgoing officers are Penina Axelrad, Boris Pervan, John Clark, Robert Bunton, and Lyn Dutton. Thanks to all of them for continuing a tradition of excellence.
New Satellite Division Officers
The incoming Satellite Division officers are:
John Lavrakas, chair
Elizabeth Cannon, vice chair
Pratap Misra, secretary
Marie Lage, treasurer
Günter Hein, European representative
Hideyuki Torimoto, Asian representative
Kepler Winner
Prof. Günter Hein, by the way, was selected as this year’s Johannes Kepler Award winner—a well-deserved honor for an outstanding contributor.
Annual Award Nominations
Don’t forget to submit nominations for the ION Annual Awards. Look at the criteria on the ION Web site for each award and ask yourself who you know that deserves it, then act! It actually doesn’t take that long—a few phone calls and a couple hours of work. The nominations are due February 21, 2003.
NTM2003 Coming Soon
Be sure to put the ION National Technical Meeting on your calendar. It will be held in Anaheim, California (Disneyland) on January 22–24, 2003. I hope to see you all there.
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Executive Vice President: Mr. Larry Hothem Treasurer: Mr. John Clark Eastern Region Vice President: Mr. James Doherty Western Region Vice President: Dr. Gérard Lachapelle Immediate Past President: Mr. Ron Hatch
Facsimile: 703-383-9689 Web site: http://www.ion.org E-mail: membership@ion.org
Technical Director: Carl Andren Assistant to the Technical Director: Miriam Lewis Meeting Services/Author Liaison: Connie Mayes Member Services/Registrar: Wendy Hickman Graphic Design/Editor: Paula Danko Information Manager: Rick Buongiovanni |
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Mapping Bingham County - Weeds and All!
By Paula Shaki Trimble, Interagency GPS Executive Board
Above: Commerce Secretary Don Evans (center) presents certificates from President George W. Bush commemorating Global Science and Technology Week, to Shelley High School students for their innovative use of GPS equipment and GIS software and their considerable contribution to their community. Accompanying the students were Paul Muirbrook, Superintendant of the Bingham County Weed Department, his wife, Pam (left back row), and science teacher Mike Winston and his wife, Joan. Below: Students Lori West, Kurt Edwards, Jake Scott (white shirts, left to right), and Danson Stark (at podium) present their work at George Washington University to high school and middle school students in the Washington, D.C. area. |
As part of its work to promote GPS as a world standard, the Interagency GPS Executive Board (IGEB) conducts domestic and international outreach activities to educate potential users about GPS, its augmentations and efforts to improve those services. The IGEB is a nine-member senior-level policy-making body chaired by the U.S. Departments of Defense and Transportation that manages GPS and its U.S. government augmentations as national assets. A chance meeting with a Bingham County, Idaho, official during the ION GPS 2001 meeting in Salt Lake City presented just such an opportunity to reach out to young people.
In the months following the September 2001 meeting, I learned about a GPS-based school project at Shelley High School in southeastern Idaho that has literally transformed the local community. Ultimately, the IGEB and U.S. Department of Commerce, which hosts the IGEB Executive Secretariat, worked together to highlight the school’s innovative use of GPS on a national scale.
Integrating GIS, Cirriculum, and Community
During the last three years, Michael Winston, a Shelley High School science teacher, has developed the Solutions Class, which is intended to teach students the value of integrating education with community service and to expose them to technology they might not otherwise learn to use. Winston recognized the growing career fields related to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and surveying and mapping, and the lack of school curriculum designed to develop those skills. In coordination with Bingham County Weed Supervisor Paul Muirbrook, Winston’s students were trained to use GPS equipment and GIS software to produce inventories and maps of local resources and trouble spots. Most notably, they participated in a statewide campaign to eradicate noxious weeds that threaten wildlife habitats, waterways, agriculture, and recreational areas.
In the summer of 2001, Winston’s students inventoried more than 50,000 acres and 250 miles of riverbanks and canals. They identified and researched 50 poisonous plants, developed technical data for vegetation management, documented 544 weed infestations, and developed a user-friendly poisonous plant book for the county. The students emerged from the project with skills in GPS, GIS, computers, team work, problem solving and multiple career possibilities.
Winston’s students met with local and state government leaders to discuss how they can further their efforts to educate the public about noxious weeds, and are now developing a Web site on poisonous plants at the urging of state and local officials, including Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne. The high school class also helped the school board produce district boundary maps and taught third-grade students how to use GPS to map all of the local area’s fire hydrants. Winston hopes to start a national trend toward this type of community-based science and technology curriculum.
In late April, the IGEB and the U.S. Department of Commerce hosted Winston and four of his students in Washington, D.C., to participate in the White House-led Global Science and Technology Week. President George W. Bush called Global Science and Technology Week an opportunity “for young Americans to learn more about these fields and to discover how students can use science and technology skills to serve our Nation and the World.” During their tour of Washington, students Lori West, Kurt Edwards, Jake Scott and Danson Stark were the featured speakers at events at George Washington University, the Virginia Center for Innovation in Technology, and at a Global Science and Technology Week luncheon on Capitol Hill. They met with their Congressmen, were recognized personally by Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Deputy Commerce Secretary Samuel Bodman, and described their accomplishments to students, educators, policymakers, and industry representatives. Upon returning to Idaho, the students briefed local leaders and community members on their experiences and followed up with many of the contacts they made in Washington.
These students are just one example of the way GPS is being employed to solve local and global problems. As the GPS community continues its efforts to reach out to people around the world, we need to continue to highlight the practical applications of GPS and make it clear to students like those from Shelley High School that the work they are doing is important to all of us.
—Paula Shaki Trimble is a technology policy analyst in the Office of Space Commercialization at the Department of Commerce. She is detailed to the Executive Secretariat of the IGEB, where her work includes public outreach and GPS education, oversight of IGEB Stewardship projects, and monitoring spectrum issues affecting GPS.
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ION GPS 2002: A Special Report |
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Congressional Fellow Report: The Rocky Road to Retirement Security
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Within weeks they had lost their entire retirement savings. Last March two former Enron employees testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on the loss of their retirement savings due to the Enron collapse. The losses from Enron stock that was held in Enron 401(k) plans totaled almost $1 billion. Drops in employee stock value held 401(k) plans have resulted in losses totaling billions of dollars. It could happen again.
During the past year as ION’s congressional fellow, I have been helping Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, examine what went wrong at Enron and what new legislation could help fix it. One of these reforms includes an accounting bill that Congress passed earlier this year and another is a pension bill.
As Sen. Levin’s lead on the 401(k) pension reform bill, I would like to share some of the details of my work with you. Even though it doesn’t have anything to do with navigation—most of my congressional fellowship work doesn’t—this issue touches people’s lives in a significant way. Most people have 401(k) plans, and most people are actually in a position to do something about the most significant problem with these plans—employees generally invest too high a percentage of their 401(k) portfolio in their employer’s stock.
A Unique Perspective
I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to observe 401(k) plans from a different perspective. Before I became a congressional fellow, I founded a company called IntegriNautics. The company’s products tap GPS as a fine guidance sensor to precisely control heavy machinery in agriculture, aerospace, and mining. One of the first things I did at the company was to set up a top-tier 401(k) plan even though we were a small organization at the time. One of the virtues of 401(k) plans is their accessibility. Even small companies can use them to be more competitive in the marketplace.
Enron exposed a serious flaw in ERISA—the set of laws that govern 401(k) programs. Even today this flaw needs to be addressed. The problem is a lack of diversification. Through no real fault of their own, employees are still loading their plans with too much of their own company stock.
What the Experts Say
Portfolio managers on Wall Street and Nobel prize winning economists advise not investing any more than 5 percent of a mutual fund in any one security. For 401(k) plans even a 20 percent concentration is already on the high side. Yet the concentration value for many Fortune 500 companies is as high as 90 percent.
Obviously, we all hope that there will be no more corporate implosions like Enron or Worldcom. But already there have been far too many cases where a company stock has dropped precipitously leading to layoffs and loss of 401(k) value. Even in a healthy economy, the worst scenario is to lose your job and retirement savings at the same time.
Key Considerations
Retirement Security. Surveys show that employees really like their 401(k) plans. Day trading aside, these plans have become a serious means to retirement security. More than $2 trillion is now invested in 401(k) plans. There is a lot of retirement security riding on good management of this money.
Pressure to Pump Up Concentration. Both employees and employers have plenty of reasons for employees to invest in their own companies. There is constructive potential here for aligning employee-employer interests—at least to a point. And, through some special tax splicing, companies receive a significant tax break—the “ESOP dividend deduction”—when they have company stock in an employee’s plan. Taxpayers contribute millions of dollars annually to companies who have concentration levels that are higher than what the experts say these levels should be.
Taxpayer Backing. Taxpayers bankroll individual pension plans with over $100 billion worth of salary deferrals annually. This is the largest tax expenditure in existence. It surpasses the medical and home mortgage interest deductions.
Given the advice of Wall Street experts and economists, if your are saving for retirement—or at least backing someone else’s retirement through tax deferrals—diversification is the most important strategy. Taxpayers should insist that their money be invested according to the best practices available.
The overwhelming majority of companies, both public and private, do not even offer company stock for their 401(k) plans. The pension reform legislation under consideration mostly addresses those who do. Passing any such legislation failed in the 107th Congress perhaps as an early casualty of the Iraq situation, but it will likely be taken up again early next year.
The fundamental tension has to do with how to lower concentration for retirement savings without restricting employee choice. Unfortunately the pressures to increase concentration have not gone away. In spite of billions of dollars of recent losses to plans holding company stock, the 401(k) program has the strongest proclivity of any retirement plan in existence to push up employee concentration.
Initial proposals that used caps or constraints met with resistance. Perhaps the most effective solution would use a lottery to pick a non-insider employee from a pool of volunteers.1 The employee trustee would have the opportunity to speak out to plan participants about over concentration. Employees would then be free to make their own decisions about whose advice they will heed when it comes to their own money.
401(k) Retirement Road Map
Obviously there are many types of retirement savings plans available to companies and their employees. But to the extent that a 401(k) plan is used as a retirement plan, the following practices will both maximize the return of the taxpayer investment in 401(k) deferrals and create a healthier relationship between employers and employees because employers will be looking out for the retirement security of their employees.
Employees should follow the advice of Wall Street portfolio managers and Nobel Prize winning economists: Keep the concentration of company stock in 401(k) plans low.
Employers should implement policies that keep the concentration of company stock in 401(k) plans low: Matching in company stock can be a good thing in moderation.
Although these formulas may seem simple, they go a long way toward solving the problem.
It has been fascinating to be a part of the ebb and flow of this bill as well as to work through the politics and policy behind it. I think that I understand the forces that drive up concentration and create the urgent need for this legislation. But until this bill does go through, I also can’t help but wonder what would need to happen for this issue to resolve itself. A small handful of people at their own companies could take personal responsibility—both for themselves and for others—for keeping the road to retirement security from being so rocky.
I am grateful to the ION for making my congressional fellowship possible. It is and has been an extraordinary experience.
Notes:
1. That employee would serve as a minority trustee on the 401(k) plan board. This board is mostly ministerial and having such a trustee would not have any affect on the company’s control of the plan. It
is not commonly appreciated that a plan’s assets are entirely owned by employees—not the company. This includes the company stock held by the plan. Therefore, there is an intrinsic conflict of interest because the fiduciaries of the plan also happen to be company insiders. The employee trustee doesn’t eliminate the conflict of interest, but it probably mitigates it enough.
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Portney's Corner: Voyage to Arcturus
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A spaceship (internal pressure and temperature to standard Earth sea level conditions) is in interstellar space enroute to Arcturus. It is manned by space aliens who are balloon shaped and filled with helium. As the spaceship accelerates in one direction at a value equal to gravity at the surface of the Earth, which way do the space aliens move relative to acceleration? Hint, if the spaceship lands on the surface of the Earth its occupants are subject to the effects of the Earth’s gravitational field. This causes the space aliens to float about the ceiling of their spaceship just as a tethered helium filled balloon. The spaceship, enroute to Arcturus, experiences explosive decompression resulting from a skin rupture.
Which way do the space aliens move relative to acceleration? Select the correct answer below.
| Before Explosive Decompression | After Explosive Decompression | |
| A. | Opposite direction | Same direction |
| B. | Same direction | Opposite direction |
| C. | Remain stationary | Opposite direction |
| D. | Remain stationary | Oscillate to and fro |
In interstellar space, the gravity field is very weak. The principle of equivalence, from the relativistic theory of gravity, postulates that a uniform pseudo-gravitational field exists in the opposite direction of acceleration for observations conducted in an accelerated chamber. Events that take place in a real gravitational field will be experienced in an artificial field as well. (See Figure 1.) Therefore the correct answer is B.
Thus, the aliens move in the direction of acceleration before explosive decompression. After explosive decompression, the aliens are now heavier than the vacuum introduced from the outside and therefore move in the opposite direction.
You can find more of Portney's Ponderables at www.navworld.com.
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From the ION Historian: Navigation Telegraphy
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The determination of longitude was the dominant navigation challenge of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The available methods of lunar distance and observation of Jupiter’s moons were exceedingly cumbersome and intermittent. The first author known to have proposed the employment of a timekeeper for determining longitude at sea is Gemma Frisius in his work, De Principiis Astronomiae Cosmographicae, published in Louvain, France in 1530. The principle of longitude determination by time utilizes the earth’s angular rotation rate (assumed constant) with respect to a celestial reference to determine the difference between the instant either the sun or a star crossed the local meridian of an unknown place and the instant it crossed the local meridian of a reference location. Thus, longitude differences were equivalent to differences in the time on local clocks separated by some distance east or west. For instance, if the sun transited the local meridian of an unknown location 100 seconds in time after the
Sun’s transit of a reference location at the same latitude, then the unknown location would be located approximately 25 nautical miles west of the reference location.
An Enginnering Challenge
The sensitivity of one-quarter nautical miles of error (at the equator) for each second of time error presented an engineering challenge to the timepiece makers of the period. The story of how John ‘Longitude’ Harrison (1693-1776) eventually received nearly the whole of the 1714 Longitude Act’s highest award has been told often and well. John Harrison died at the age of 82 on 24 March 1776, just eight months after Captain Cook had returned from a voyage which proved beyond all doubts that it was possible to make a satisfactory seagoing longitude watch.
The comparison of time at two separated locations required the physical transportation of timepieces, or more prudently, multiple timepieces. But the instruments Harrison produced, subsequently referred to as chronometers, were experimental and unique. Chronometers were bulky and expensive precision instruments, carefully cushioned in bread-loaf-sized waterproof wooden boxes that had to be handled with the utmost care. The determination of longitude, was, of course, not a problem exclusive to mariners.
The young nation, the United States of America, as a result of enormous territorial expansion such as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, was mostly an uncharted trackless wilderness. The country was faced with the challenge of developing, defending, commercializing, and taxing millions of square miles of uncharted land, shoals and inland waterways. Surveyors, astronomers, and topographers hired by the U.S. Coast Survey, chartered by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807, routinely toted three or more chronometers-some actually took more than a dozen. Still, these skilled navigation practitioners often found their chronometers had “tripped” because of temperature changes or jostling, jeopardizing the precision of painstaking longitude calculations.
On June 9, 1844, just two weeks after Samuel F. B. Morse’s inaugural Biblical quotation, “What hath God wrought?,” flashed 40 miles along the first experimental telegraph wire between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Commodore Charles Wilkes performed the first-ever telegraphic-longitude experiment.
The Wilkes Experiment
Wilkes, famous for recently leading the U.S. Exploring Expedition 87,000 miles around the Pacific Ocean, was one of the nation’s foremost chronometric experts. As the former superintendent of the U.S. Navy’s Depot of Charts and Instruments (predecessor of the U.S. Naval Observatory and the Department of Hydrography), he had established rigorous, standardized procedures for rating marine chronometers. Wilkes and an associate operated a telegraph line between the Battle Monument in Baltimore and the Capitol building in Washington. By comparing the local times at the point of transmission and reception of the telegraph signal, and assuming that the telegraph’s electromagnetic transmission was instantaneous, the difference in longitude could be calculated from the difference in local times. After three days of observations, Wilkes calculated that the Battle Monument of Baltimore was one minute 34.87 seconds east of the Capitol in Washington. Wilkes had discovered a method of transferring time without carrying
chronometers. Until the advent of the telegraph, there was no direct, “instantaneous” method to compare clocks at places hundreds of miles apart.
After Wilkes pioneering proof of the concept for the U.S.Navy, the U.S. Coast Survey took the lead. As soon as commercial telegraph lines linked offices in major cities, the Coast Survey paid to have additional wires extended to each city’s astronomical observatory; it then contracted with astronomers to determine differences in longitude. With subsequent technical refinements of Wilkes’ methodology, by 1856 telegraphically determined primary geodetic baselines between astronomical points of geodetic significance had been made throughout much of the Eastern U.S. and Canada. The telegraph was as revolutionary for determining longitude on land as the marine chronometer was for finding longitude at sea. The telegraphic method of determining longitudes held sway for eight decades not only in the U.S. but also in Europe—being replaced only in the 1920s by radio (wireless) positioning techniques. Along the way, the telegraph also reformed observational astronomy and nationwide timekeeping.
—Much of the material in this article was obtained from an article by Trudy Bell, “The Victorian Global Positioning System,” published in the Spring 2002 issue of The BENT OF TAU BETA PI. Further data was obtained from Howse, Derek, “Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude,” Oxford University Press, 1980.
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GNSS AROUND THE GLOBE
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CGSIC Holds 40th Meeting
A forum for the exchange of information and viewpoints on GPS-related matters
GPS modernization, sustainment, and security issues highlighted the 40th meeting of the Civil GPS Service Interface Committee (CGSIC) in Portland, Oregon, Sept. 22–24 convened by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT).
The modernization topic was particularly underscored by a presentation from U.S. Air Force Lt. Arnold Werschky of the GPS Master Control Station at Schriever AFB, Colorado, and Tom Nagel, a deputy program manager at the GPS Joint Program Office representing the DoT. In addition to his discussions of modernization, Nagel also described a new initiative to create a comprehensive approach to establishing civil requirements for GPS system improvements. Using a Dynamic Object Oriented Requirements Software (DOORS), DoT seeks to maintain an integrated database of requirements that are cross-correlated with performance attributes in the various standards documents that incorporate GPS requirements.
Monitoring the Signal
Brent Renfro, University of Texas Applied Research Laboratories, described efforts to develop a Global Dual Monitoring System (GDMS) for GPS.
“Currently, there is no [continuous worldwide] monitoring of the civil signal and incomplete monitoring of the military signal,” Renfro said, because of the lack of ground tracking facilities and an agency mandate for more thorough integrity monitoring. Among the consequences of this situation is the risk that “a service failure may go undetected for a long time,” difficulties in verifying that performance specifications are met, and “a lack of formal evidence to refute claims of failure,” Renfro said. As a result, “it makes acceptance of GPS as a ‘global standard’ difficult.”
The GDMS initiative seeks to link GPS data collection networks established by various scientific, commercial, public, and private organizations with a common data archiving, processing, fusion, and reporting system that would provide global, dual monitoring of satellite health and signals in near-real time. The system would provide feedback to the Operational Control Segment and the user community by way of the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center and other channels.
Finding a Host
Project leaders envision a series of memoranda of agreement among sponsors of the data collection networks and public agencies to establish standards and address security concerns. “Finding an appropriate host agency is a challenge,” Renfro acknowledged.
The GDMS initiative is headed by Nagel with Karen Van Dyke of the DoT Volpe Transportation Research Center serving as the project integrator. Several CGSIC speakers contended that radio frequency interference poses one of the greatest current and future threats to reliable, uninterrupted use of GPS. Leading the list of threats is unlicensed use of ultra-wide-band technology, about which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued its first report and order earlier this year.
Organized as a forum for exchange of information and viewpoints on GPS-related matters, the 40th CGSIC meeting continued a serial conversation that stretches back more than14 years!
- Reprinted in part from the Sept.26, issue of the ION GPS 2002 Show Daily, as written by Glenn Gibbons, GPS World.
OSU Symposium Student Winners
Ohio State University held the Heiskanen Sympossium in Geodesy Oct. 1–4, in Columbus, Ohio. The Institute of Navigation co-sponsored the event along with other organizations, and the ION provided the prize money for the student paper competition.
(Pictured from left to right): Yudan Yi (3rd place, OSU), Shin-Chan Han (1st place, OSU), Hung-Kyu Lee (2nd place, UNSW), Larry Hothem, ION Technical Committees chair; Juan Serpas (OSU), Esteban Vazquez (OSU), Mosab Hawarey (Purdue University); and Mike Willis (OSU)(not pictured). The three finalists received the ION awards, the other four students received the certificates of appreciation and hand-held GPS receivers, from by Woolpert LLP.
Outstanding Cadets of the U.S. Coast Guard
and the U.S. Air Force Academies
Receive ION Awards
Ohio State University held the Heiskanen Sympossium in Geodesy Oct. 1–4, in Columbus, Ohio. The Institute of Navigation co-sponsored the event along with other organizations, and the ION provided the prize money for the student paper competition.
(Pictured from left to right): Yudan Yi (3rd place, OSU), Shin-Chan Han (1st place, OSU), Hung-Kyu Lee (2nd place, UNSW), Larry Hothem, ION Technical Committees chair; Juan Serpas (OSU), Esteban Vazquez (OSU), Mosab Hawarey (Purdue University); and Mike Willis (OSU)(not pictured). The three finalists received the ION awards, the other four students received the certificates of appreciation and hand-held GPS receivers, from by Woolpert LLP.
Section News
ALBERTA SECTION
At its Sept. 20 meeting, Prof. Gérard Lachapelle spoke about the R&D initiatives in GNSS and wireless location at the University of Calgary’s Dept. of Geomatics Engineering. Afterward, research associate Glenn MacGougan addressed the group about the increasing demand for location functions in indoor and urban canyon environments. He explained how an unaided, high-sensitivity receiver was tested under shaded signal environments ranging from residential outdoor areas to urban canyons. Measurement analysis was performed in both the observation and position domains. Results show that the receiver tested can yield measurements with C/N0 degradations in excess of 20 dB-Hz, as compared to line-of-sight measurements. Position accuracy is a function of the remaining satellite geometry and measurement noise, which in turn are a function of the surrounding environment.
DAYTON SECTION
October’s meeting featured Greg Gerten of Veridian Engineering who discussed the effects of interference on GPS receivers and the challenges of detecting and locating its source.
NORCAL SECTION
ION president, Dr. Rudolph Kalafus, spoke at NORCAL’s September meeting about “ION—Developing and Applying Navigation Expertise.” Dr. Kalafus is director of the Core Technology Group of Trimble’s Aerospace Division, co-chair of the RTCA SC-159 Interference Working Group and chair of RTCM Special Committee 104 that sets standards for differential GPS systems.
NEW ENGLAND SECTION
On Oct. 9, the New England Section held its twenty-sixth meeting at the Dynamics Research Corp. in Andover, Mass. Dr. H. James Rome, professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering at UMass Lowell and a former program manager at Dynamics Research Corp., presented “One-Foot Accuracy … and No GPS!” Dr. Rome reviewed his research on how railroads can maintain and repair aging rail beds by determining rates of change of track and rail bed parameters over time.
To accomplish this, certain sensor data from one geometry car run to another must be registered within one foot along the track. Odometers are inaccurate and even differential GPS is not sufficient, particularly where railroads experience outages such as in tunnels and urban areas.
Dr. Rome has developed track data alignment software capable of determining position corrections of various geometry car runs to a common reference to within one-foot accuracy. The technique, which incorporates a Kalman filter to match gage and cross-level from one run to another, is a map matching procedure where the “map” is a reference run and the results are used to correct the odometer on other runs. Moreover, it is robust enough to operate through large stretches where the track has been modified and can even handle wheel lock, data drops, and operator mistakes. The approach is also used to determine sudden and gradual changes in track parameters over time with pinpoint navigation accuracy provided to the maintenance crew to effect repairs.
The section was also pleased to host Dr. James T. Doherty, ION’s Eastern Regional vice president, who discussed the important work of The Institute of Navigation, including its congressional fellow program, and the benefits of ION membership. Dr. Doherty also challenged the section to initiate a pilot scholarship program.
At this meeting the New England Section also installed its 2002-2003 officers. The new officers are as follows: Alan H. Zorn, Dynamics Research Corp., chair; Elliott Kaplan, The MITRE Corporation, vice chair; Dr. George Koehler, Dynamics Research Corp., secretary; Dr. William R. Michalson, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, treasurer; Rochelle Moore, Draper Laboratory and Dr. Anthea Coster, Lincoln Laboratory, program chairs; Jon S. Parmet, Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, special activities chair; Ilir F. Progri, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, publicity chair; Dr. Bette M. Winer, The MITRE Corporation, corporate/state liaison chair; Ritesh Shukla, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, student liaison chair; Jonathan Hill, Hartford University, membership.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN SECTION
The Rocky Mountain Section (RMS) hosted a technical meeting on Sept. 17, 2002, at Overlook Systems in Colorado Springs, Colo. First Lt. David Friedman and 1st Lt. AG Werschky, both of the Air Force Second Space Operation Squadron, presented a talk entitled, “Innovative Ways of Supporting an Aging GPS Constellation.” The presentation covered the operational aspects of an aging GPS constellation and highlighted unique support to extend the functional mission life of a particular satellite vehicle within the GPS constellation.
On Oct. 19, the RMS supported a scouting Jamboree on the Air. At this event, the section taught scouts and students about the Global Positioning System, offered hands-on practice on using GPS receivers, and supported a planned GPS-instrumented balloon launch by providing graphical updates on the location of the balloon.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SECTION
The Southern California Section’s Nov. 7, 2002, meeting was hosted by the Aerospace Corporation. Dr. Paul Galyean spoke about the precision navigation Starfire wide-area DGPS system. Dr. Galyean is currently the director of Precise Positioning at NavCom Technology.
StarFire is a wide-area, dual-frequency DGPS system that delivers corrections via geostationary satellites to enable real-time global sub-decimeter positioning.
StarFire employs dual frequency user receivers as well as dual frequency reference receivers to achieve this level of accuracy. Over 30 reference sites distributed around the world provide measurement data via the Internet in real time to two redundant processing hubs in the United States. Each of these hubs compute clock and orbit corrections for each satellite and deliver them to three Land Earth Stations from which they are uplinked to the geostationary satellites for broadcast to users.
WASHINGTON D.C. SECTION
The Washington, D.C. section met at the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Va., on Nov. 13, 2002. The featured speaker was Frank Czopek who gave a lively talk about how the life expentency of Block II/IIA satellites have an influence on GPS policy. He discussed satellite life limiting factors and the tools that can be use to predict satellite life. He also addressed the impact that extended GPS life could have to the schedule and cost of the program.
Mr. Czopek is currently the program manager of the On-Orbit Support contract for the BLK II/IIA satellites that provides contractor support for the on-orbit constellation to 2SOPS.
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RTCA Corner
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The fifty-ninth meeting of SC-159 was held on August 16 at RTCA. Items approved by the committee and the reports of select work groups follow.
Next Meeting: January 13-17, 2003
Chair: Larry Chesto, Consultant
Vice Chair: George Ligler, PMEI
Secretary: Young Lee, The MITRE Corporation
The committee approved the following four items:
- 1. Revised DO-235, Assessment of Radio Frequency Interference Relevant to the GNSS. The Program Management Committee will consider the document for approval.
- 2. A report entitled—RTCA SC159 Response to the Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) Recommendation Regarding Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM). The report concludes that there is no autonomous integrity monitoring method better than conventional RAIM.
- 3. Errata for DO-229C. The Errata provides a small number of editorial corrections.
- 4. A recommendation to expand the SC-159 Terms of Reference (TOR), to include consideration of Galileo in future Minimum Aviation System Performance Standards (MASPS), Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) and other projects.
Working Group-1, Third Civil Frequency, discussed GPS modernization status, L5 Pseudo Random Noise (PRN) code selection and the latest from the Galileo program. The group’s work program includes a WAAS/SBAS L5 Interface Control Document, an update to DO-261, L5 Signal Specification, and a MOPS for airborne equipment.
Working Group-2, GPS/WAAS, initiated activity to revise DO-228—MOPS for GNSS Airborne Antenna Equipment. The group also reviewed the current status of the WAAS program. Initial Operational Capability for WAAS Phase 1 is expected between July and December 2003. FAA proposed AC 20-138A, Airworthiness Approval of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Equipment, is available for public comment.
Working Group-2A, GPS/GLONASS, continues to monitor GLONASS activity.
Working Group-2C, GPS/Inertial, is working to determine the degree to which tightly integrated GPS/inertial coasting would help continued navigation in the presence of interference. Three independent analyses produced similar coast times. Work is ongoing to advance the gravity error compensation and possibly double the coast times.
Working Group-4, GPS/LAAS, continued to develop changes to DO-245, LAAS MASPS. Significant progress was reported on CAT II/III Precision Approach Task requirements, availability tradeoffs and augmentation alternatives. WG-4 defined a preliminary concept for incorporating complex approach procedure definitions in the message block for curved/segmented approaches, departure guidance and guided missed approaches.
Working Group-5, Airport Surface Navigation and Surveillance, is keeping current on the status of airport surface requirements. The WG agreed on clear definitions for “navigation” and “situational awareness” that properly reflect the intended use of LAAS guidance information for surface applications.
Working Group-6, GPS/Interference, completed the GNSS L1 RFI Assessment Report and continued work on the L5 RFI Assessment Report.
RTCA, Inc. is a private, not-for-profit corporation that develops consensus-based recommendations regarding communications, navigation, surveillance and air traffic management (CNS/ATM) system issues. RTCA functions as a federal advisory committee. Its recommendations are used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as the basis for policy, program and regulatory decisions, and by the private sector as the basis for development, investment and other business decisions.
| IN MEMORIAM | |
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Richard Thomas Gibson passed away Nov. 6, 2002, due to complications from a heart transplant. In 1980, Dick Gibson co-founded CAST Inc., where he served as vice president responsible for worldwide business development of GPS products.
He was a longtime member of The Institute of Navigation. He is survived by his wife, Maggie, of 40 years; his son, John Gibson, of Newport Beach; and his mother, Helen Pike. Dick Gibson will be dearly missed by family, friends, and colleagues. |
Lois Ford Thurlow, the widow of the late Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow, died in February of this year.
Col. Thurlow is the namesake of the Thomas L. Thurlow Award given by the Institute of Navigation in recognition for outstand contributions to the science of navigation. He was also the navigator on the record-setting Houward Hughes’ round-the world flight in 1938. Col. Thurlow predeceased his wife, Lois, in 1944 when he met an untimely death while flight testing a new compass. Lois is survived by her sons Thomas and Hugh of Houston, Texas. |
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Corporate Profile
Fastrax Ltd.
Fastrax is a privately owned independent GPS company providing software, hardware and solutions for corporations implementing GPS capabilities into their products. Fastrax Ltd. is focusing on transforming new GPS technologies to highly scaleable solutions with open interfaces and ultra low power, miniature hardware design—Smart Positioning™. Fastrax develops GPS receivers with focus on hand-held, portable applications such as mobile phones, sports instruments, and palm computers. The products are intended for high volume consumer markets where low power consumption and small size are crucial parameters. Capability for indoor navigation is currently under development utilizing A-GPS (Assisted GPS) or Pseudolite technology to enable it to solve the various needs for location-based services in indoor environments. Fastrax also has a broad expertise in GPS antenna designs for different user application. For more information about Fastrax Ltd., go to www.fastrax.fi. |
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CALENDAR OF EVENTS
January 2003
February 2003
April 2003
May 2003 |
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