Principles of Global Positioning System
The principles and applications of the Global Positioning System (US), GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (EU) and Beidou (China), known as Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), along with other space geodetic systems, including very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI), satellite laser ranging (SLR), and Interferometric Synthetics Aperture Radar (InSAR). Topics covered include CDMA and FDMA encoding used by these systems to allow measurements of pseudo-range and carrier phase which allow millimeter accuracy positioning, models and analysis methods required for millimeter accuracy positioning. Other topics include: satellite orbit modeling, atmospheric refraction modeling, estimation techniques (including Kalman filtering), statistical and spectral analysis of data. Application areas include tectonic studies of Earth deformation, meteorology, space weather, and millimeter accuracy tracking of moving objects.
Spring 2012 · Principles of the Global Positioning System
The aim of this course is to introduce the principles of the Global Positioning System and to demonstrate its application to various aspects of Earth Sciences. The specific content of the course depends each year on the interests of the students in the class. In some cases, the class interests are towards the geophysical applications of GPS and we concentrate on high precision (millimeter level) positioning on regional and global scales. In other cases, the interests have been more toward engineering applications of kinematic positioning with GPS in which case the concentration is on positioning with slightly less accuracy but being able to do so for a moving object. In all cases, we concentrate on the fundamental issues so that students should gain an understanding of the basic limitations of the system and how to extend its application to areas not yet fully explored.
Readings
- Hofmann-Wellenhof, B., H. Lichtenegger, and J. Collins. GPS Theory and Practice . Springer, 1994. ISBN: 9780387824772.
- Parkinson, B. W., J. Spilker, et al. Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications . Vol. 1. American Institute of Aeronautics & Ast, 1996. ISBN: 9781563471063.
- ———. Global Positioning System: Theory and Applications . Vol. 2. American Institute of Aeronautics & Ast, 1996. ISBN: 9781563471070.
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: Calculus II (GIR) , Physics I (GIR) , and 18.06 G (Spring) 3-0-9 units
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2012
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.