The Global Positioning System, popularly known as GPS has crawled into our lives almost instantaneously. It is nothing but a network of satellites that orbit round the earth in a fixed path, and send signals to any GPS receiver on earth. With the time code and geographical data, these signals calculate the exact position, speed and time on the planet. When we turn back the pages through the Evolution of GPS, it is evident that GPS was originally designed for military and intelligence purpose, during the time of Cold war in 1960s.
United States of America was the first to come out with the initial satellite navigation system. Dubbed as Transit, it was initially tested by US Navy in 1960. The next on line was Timation Satellite and this demonstrated that accurate atomic clocks could be calculated from space. Thereafter, a series of eleven satellites was launched between the time period from 1978 to 1985. In between, during 1982, Russian Federation Ministry of Defence launched its first GLONASS satellites.
Even though the GPS arena showed a massive growth during this period, the usefulness of system was still questioned by the sponsors. When a Korean Airline was shot down by Soviet fighters in 1983, since it had gone lost into the Soviet territory, GPS system was decided to be used for civilian purpose of tracking locations to avoid such accidents. Again GPS development had a slap when space shuttle Challenger had a disaster 1986. After two years, the number of satellites got increased and subsequently their installation and activation happened. By 1993, a full satellite constellation of 24 GPS NavSTAR satellites were done and a Full Operational Capability (FOC) was announced. Currently, with more launches like five IIR-M GPS satellites, the GPS network has around 30 active satellites in the orbit.
With the support of these satellites, GPS is continuing to serve us in hundreds of applications including navigation, route finding, map making, earthquake research,climate studies,,geocaching and many more.
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