SpaceX, the space exploration company led by Elon Musk, has just launched satellite navigation.
On Tuesday, the company launched a Falcon 9 rocket for its first United States Space Force mission. The rocket took off at 4:10 pm EST from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Staton Air Force in Florida. On board was a Global Positioning System satellite, more commonly known as GPS. The mission sent the third satellite for the new GPS III project, a major update to the constellation used by people around the world to find their way.
“His GPS got a little better,” Musk wrote on Twitter moments after the GPS III satellite was deployed. Falcon 9 used to send the satellite, the first flight for this specific booster, landed on the unmanned spacecraft Just read the instructions after launch.
The launch is a great time for GPS, which has become almost ubiquitous with the smartphone boom in the past decade. Not just for military personnel to identify your location, GPS now supports a host of imaginative applications. Find your way to Starbucks in seconds, locate Pokémon in your local park, and even set alerts to remind you of things before you leave the office. GPS has become the invisible backbone of an incredibly long list of services.
GPS III, explains Lockheed Martin, will make GPS three times more accurate. Gene McCall, former chairman of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, wrote in National Defense Magazine In April, this suggests that the accuracy would increase from 28 inches to nine very precise inches.
Of course, that will be quite difficult to notice in practice. Perhaps that is why Musk used the phrase “a little better.” But GPS III also offers other benefits that enhance the aging constellation: benefits like stronger protections against military interference, longer-lasting satellites, and better interoperability with constellations in other countries.
GPS: what is it? – The technology, Encyclopedia Britannica he explains, uses signals from satellites in the sky to understand a user’s location. A receiver measures how long it took for the signal from a given satellite to reach Earth, a figure of about a tenth of a second. Multiply time by the speed of a radio wave, 186,000 miles per second, to calculate distance. Second-generation satellites orbit about 20,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface.
The receiver takes readings from three other satellites and uses these imaginary lines to calculate the receiver’s longitude, latitude, and altitude based on its position relative to the four satellites.
That is the very basic idea. The receiver performs more calculations to account for other problems that could distort those readings. And when we talk about a “receiver”, we usually think of a smartphone, but a modern smartphone uses data from other sources like cell phone towers and Wi-Fi access points, bringing it all together to make readings faster and more accurate.
And although “GPS” is used in informal language to refer to any type of navigation like this, the United States GPS constellation that began in 1978 is just a player in this global field. GLONASS, or GLObal NAvigation Satellite System, was first launched by the Soviet Union in 1982. Beidou was first launched by China in 2000. Galileo, from the European Space Agency, got his first experimental satellite in 2005. The iPhone 8 and later are compatible with GPS, GLONASS and Galileo.
GPS III: why more is better? – GPS received its first satellite in 1978. Another nine were launched in the next decade, but this early constellation was more experimental. Encyclopedia Britannica explains that 24 second-generation satellites were launched from 1989 to 1994.
The United States Air Force is planning 10 third-generation GPS satellites. SpaceX launched the first in December 2018, and Lockheed Martin launched the second in August 2019.
Beyond tripling accuracy, the new constellation is configured to offer better protection for military applications with eight times stronger signals. These strong signals should make the jam more difficult. Each satellite will also last 15 years, about twice as long as other GPS spacecraft in the sky. It must also offer compatibility with other satellite systems, facilitating interoperability with other systems.
GPS may be the invisible backbone of current applications, but that backbone has gotten a little stronger.
