Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
ander the Great; the South Pacific explorers; Ibn Battuta; Bartolomeu Dias,
Columbus and Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan; Sir Francis Drake;
James Cook; Nain Singh Rawat. These men cover 2,500 years of history
and make their appearance in the topic at just the right place—very appro-
priately for explorers.
When we reach the end of the topic, we will find that we have been
preceded by bats, dolphins, cuckoos, warblers, and other animals that
evolved extremely impressive navigational skills long before humans ar-
rived on the world stage.
There are plenty of topics which detail the astonishing exploratory jour-
neys that have been made over the centuries (many of the better topics are
included in the bibliography), and there are many texts aimed at students
of the various fields we will touch upon here. Geodesy, cartography, and
remote sensing form the technical backbone of our subject: all of these
disciplines are intimately connected with navigation. There are remark-
ably few topics, however, in which the authors seek as I do to explain the
technical aspects of navigation without relying heavily upon mathematics.
How to convey such technical understanding without math? Navigation is,
at its core, a geometrical science, and so many of its principles can be
conveyed very e√ectively with diagrams. I have gone to some considerable
e√ort to create pictorial illustrations of the mathematical ideas under-
pinning navigation, and these diagrams along with some helpful text will
take the place of pages of convoluted mathematical equations. Nitty-gritty
details (of how to measure or calculate your position on the surface of the
globe) are not a part of the story I will be telling, but you will learn why it
all works.
Geodesy, cartography, remote sensing—all of these disciplines are inter-
woven with navigation because, after all, navigators plot a course on charts
of the world, or a part of the world, based upon measurements that they
have made. People from very di√erent cultures and historical periods have
contributed to the enormous corpus of knowledge that is necessary for all
aspects of navigation. These people will have had very di√erent outlooks
and motivations, but they faced the same physical problem: how to get
from
A
to
B
. Their knowledge and insights were recorded and passed down
to the next generation—in some cases, to the next hundred generations.
Geodesy is explored in the early chapters because, of course, we need to
know the nature of the object—the beautiful, ugly, harsh, and beatific
spheroid upon which we walk, sail, and pass our lives as it hurtles through
space. Cartography—mapmaking—is the handmaiden of navigation. Over
