State Your Position
To navigate, you must know roughly where you stand relative to your designation, so you can head in the right direction. In locations where landmarks are not available to help navigate (in deserts, on seas), objects in the sky are the only reference points. While celestial objects move fairly predictably, and rough longitude is not too difficult to find, it is not a simple matter to determine latitude and precise positions. In this activity, students investigate the uses and advantages of modern GPS for navigation.
Students examine the uses and advantages of modern GPS for navigationCopyright Microsoft Corporation 1983-2001.
Currently, the accuracy of a typical GPS receiver is about five meters, and engineers are continually improving the degree of accuracy. Engineering improvements to measurement devices and advances in mathematical analysis keep increasing accuracy over time, but some fundamental limitations still remain: cloudy weather, our knowledge of the exact positions of celestial objects at future times, and our ability to measure object positions accurately at those times.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Explore the uses and advantages of modern GPS for navigation
- Triangulate a position from given data
- Understand how errors in data may affect results