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ISRO Navigation Centre near Bangalore unveiled

Indian Space Research Organisation has unveiled its Navigation Centre in Bangalore Rural District for the proposed Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), a constellation of seven spacecrafts that will enable users to know their location and time accurately. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/

Cost of modernized ground control system for GPS satellites has increased

The Defense Department added the GPS Next Generation Operational Control System to its annual Selected Acquisition Report, which summarizes the latest estimates of cost, schedule and performance status for key military programs.
The report did not detail the reasons for the cost increase to the GPS Operational Control System, which Raytheon Co. has been developing since February 2010, when it won an initial contract valued at $888.4 million.

Russia’s NIS GLONASS, India’s TechMahindra sign cooperation agreement

Russia’s NIS GLONASS has signed an agreement on cooperation in the sphere of navigation with India’s TechMahindra. Both the parties intend to pool efforts to develop services based on the use of GLONASS / GPS signals in India. In particular, the partners plan to jointly develop such projects as the monitoring of all types of transport, navigation solutions for the police, as well as intelligent transportation systems for large cities. In addition, NIS plans to provide advisory services to Indian companies in the sphere of marketing research. http://indrus.in/news/

Smartphone Technology Inspires Design for Smart Unattended Ground Sensor

DARPA’s Adaptable Sensor System (ADAPT) program aims to transform how unattended sensors are developed for the military by using an original design manufacturer (ODM) process similar to that of the commercial smartphone industry. The goal is to develop low-cost, rapidly updatable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors in less than a year, a marked improvement to the current three-to-eight year development process.

The program has developed the core ADAPT hardware and software package using a customized Android Operating System (OS) to provide capabilities common to all ISR sensors. The program recently completed its first reference design and developed application-specific software for an unattended ground sensor (UGS) that uses the ADAPT core. This new UGS could provide users with a cost-effective ground sensing capability. http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2013/05/29.aspx

NUDT makes high-performance satellite navigation receiver

A new-type high-performance satellite navigation receiver, which was developed by the College of Electronic Science and Engineering under the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), made its debut recently. The satellite navigation receiver can simultaneously receive signals of BeiDou, GPS, GLONASS with a positioning accuracy of 10 meters. http://www.ecns.cn/military/

Thailand’s GPS market tends to grow to reach Bt4 bln this year

Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) said the country’s GPS is growing, with its overall value expected to reach Bt4 billion this year.
Passakorn Prathombutr, NSTDA Service Research and Innovation Program Director, spoke of a recent study revealing the value of the GPS market in the country that last year alone some 305,000 GPS devices were sold for more than Bt3.5 billion.

Mobile GPS devices were most sold, while those to be installed in vehicles were most expensive.

He predicted that this year’s market share would realise 23 per cent more than last year’s at Bt4.2 billion, or around 378,000 devices. http://www.pattayamail.com/

Big earthquakes create global scale GPS errors

Thirteen years of supersized earthquakes have contaminated GPS sites around the world, a new study finds. Except for spots in Australia, western Europe and the eastern tip of Canada, every GPS site on the ground underwent small but important shifts since 2000 because of big earthquakes, according to a study published May 6 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

The research confirms that great earthquakes, those bigger than magnitude 8.0, can have far-reaching effects on the Earth’s crust. And because GPS is critical for everything from calculating satellite orbits to sea level rise to earthquake hazards, scientists can’t ignore these tiny zigs and zags, the researchers conclude. http://www.livescience.com/

Pakistan signs up for Beidou

Beidou is expected to add yet another customer after Pakistan signed up to host ground stations for the service. Pakistan will follow Thailand, Laos and Brunei in becoming a Beidou customer later this month. http://www.theregister.co.uk

China invests $810M to create Beidou product ecosystem

China is hoping to expand the usefulness of its Beidou navigation satellite system by investing 5 billion yuan (US$810 million) to create an industrial park meant to house companies developing products using Beidou’s technology. The industrial park will be situated in the city of Tianjin and is expected to be fully operational in two years’ time. http://www.zdnet.com/

Sri Lanka to monitor road safety with GPS

The National Transport Commission (NTC) launched recently a pilot trial of its project which aims to monitor the driving capabilities of inter-provincial buses by using GPS.
The system provides information on the location of the buses and can monitor the behaviour of the conductors and drivers of the buses at whatever location.
According to NTC chairman, the initiative is a response to an increasing number of complaints about reckless driving, violation of road rules, disregard of the provided timetable and route, and unruly behaviour. http://www.futuregov.asia/

German robots sent to Oz to make GPS millimetre-perfect

Industrial robots from Germany will be spending their life in Australia’s great outdoors, helping to improve the accuracy of the country’s GNSS positioning knowledge. The project, a GNSS robotic calibration facility, has been switched on in Canberra, and will ultimately be part of a nationwide calibration network.

The robots are designed to track passing positioning satellites and scan the antennas, collecting information about slight deviations in the position of the antenna as satellite signals enter it from various points (referred to as bias).
“The aim is to calibrate the biases of different antennas,” explained Dr John Dawson, section leader of the National Geophysical Reference System. Different antennas from different manufacturers exhibit different biases, he explained, mainly due to very small manufacturing inconsistencies. This, however, is a problem for agencies like Geosciences Australia, which want to get sub-millimetre measurements of the deformation of the Earth’s crust due to plate tectonics. http://www.theregister.co.uk/

GPS solution provides 3-minute tsunami alerts

Researchers have shown that, by using GPS to measure ground deformation caused by a large underwater earthquake, they can provide accurate warning of the resulting tsunami in just a few minutes after the earthquake onset. Most tsunamis, including those in offshore Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004 and Japan in 2011, occur following underwater ground motion in subduction zones, locations where a tectonic plate slips under another causing a large earthquake. To a lesser extent, the resulting uplift of the sea floor also affects coastal regions. There, researchers can measure the small ground deformation along the coast with GPS and use this to determine tsunami information.

“High-precision real-time processing and inversion of these data enable reconstruction of the earthquake source, described as slip at the subduction interface. This can be used to calculate the uplift of the sea floor, which in turn is used as initial condition for a tsunami model to predict arrival times and maximum wave heights at the coast,” says lead-author Andreas Hoechner from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).

“Japan has a very dense network of GPS stations, but these were not being used for tsunami early warning as of 2011. Certainly this is going to change soon,” states Hoechner.
The scientists used raw data from the Japanese GPS Earth Observation Network (GEONET) recorded a day before to a day after the 2011 earthquake. To shorten the time needed to provide a tsunami alert, they only used data from 50 GPS stations on the northeast coast of Japan, out of about 1200 GEONET stations available in the country. http://esciencenews.com