Posts Tagged ‘satellite’

Due to poachers and hunters who use giraffe’s skin to produce cloth, the giraffe population in Western Africa has unfortunately become extremely scarce. They are slowly making their way up the endangered species list, and scientists have had to act quickly.

In order to gather more information about these long-necked, majestic creatures of Africa, eight giraffes were fitted with GPS tracking collars. These GPS collars were specially designed to fit around the giraffe’s long neck, and are also camouflaged to match the color of the giraffe’s skin so that the giraffe doesn’t become easy prey.

Using the information gathered from the GPS devices, scientists can better understand where the giraffes are most commonly gathering, which helps them figure out in which areas giraffes need the most protection from hunters. The devices also serve as a precautionary measure: many giraffe hunters may be a bit less willing to fire a gun at any giraffe wearing a GPS collar because hunting giraffes is illegal in West Africa.

Getting the GPS collars onto the giraffes is probably the most difficult part of this entire process. Scientists must first fire a tranquilizer dart at the giraffe, and then an anesthesiologist must keep the giraffe unconscious until the GPS tracking collar can be been safely placed around its long neck. It takes a team of seven men to hold down this enormous animal so that it doesn’t make any sudden movements while it is incapacitated.

With this new technology, scientists also hope to find the mating grounds of the giraffes in Western Africa. With this information, scientists will hopefully be able to relocate more giraffes to these mating grounds, thus expanding the giraffe population in Western Africa, and consequently having them lowered them on the endangered species list.

There is also another serious threat that faces the giraffe population in Africa. With industrialization just starting to grow in Western Africa, more and more trees are being cut down, and even more watering holes are being taken over for human resources. The giraffes’ natural habitat is shrinking, which is causing many giraffes to die from lack of food and water. While environmentalist efforts are still trying to limit this harming of the ecosystem, scientists are using the information they gather from the satellite tracking collars to discover better locations for the giraffe population to inhabit.

With the help of this advanced new GPS based technology, the giraffe population will hopefully live on, and these gorgeous, majestic mammals of the dusty planes of Africa can continue to thrive in peace.

Engineers from Japan have invented a prototype device that places GPS navigation technology into a pair of glasses, which they call a “Wearable Personal Navigation System”. Created at the University of Electro-Communications' Nakajima Laboratory and displayed in Tokyo at the Wireless Japan 2010 expo, these devices feature a battery powered microcomputer, as well as a magnetic directional sensor that can be lit up using LED lights.

These glasses operate is very simply. All you need to do is enter your desired destination into a computer and download that information onto the glasses’ hard drive. A walking route will be calculated, sent over to the glasses, and can immediately be used to guide you to your destination.

These glasses also have internal LED lights positioned in a circular fashion around the lens frame. The LED lights are visible in a user's peripheral field of vision, so they won’t distract the wearer from what’s going on in front of them. These small lights surrounding the frame will change their color in order to show the user which direction he or she should be walking in.

These glasses represent the forefront of GPS equipment as we know it, and they also aim to fix some of the major problems that current GPS systems impose. GPS devices of today, like smartphones and vehicle navigation systems, often require you to look down at a display while in motion – preventing you from watching where you're going – which could be very dangerous if you’re driving at high speeds or in a high traffic urban environment. With these glasses, users can look forward instead of looking down.

This technology is relatively new, and engineers are still working out the kinks in the system to make sure they’re as accurate as possible, even in those areas without satellite coverage. (Since the GPS coordinates are pre-programmed into the glasses’ hard drive, they never need to receive any signals.)

Hopefully we’ll see more of this technology sometime in the near future.

Solar storms are extremely powerful natural disasters, and they are able to cause a tremendous amount of economic damage. During a typical solar storm, the sun’s surface flares up and massive fireballs are shot into the Earth’s atmosphere. This often results in the harming of many of the electrical waves back down on earth; radio signals, satellite signals, and even cell phone signals can be shorted out from these powerful eruptions on the suns exterior. Of course, this means that a lot of GPS based equipment could very well loose accuracy or even complete satellite connection during one of these storms.

Due to the sun’s relative dormancy, solar storms tend to occur once every 11 years. The last recorded solar storm was in 2001, which means that the next one is expected to occur sometime in the year 2012.

While no solar storm is good, some can definitely be more devastating than others. Take, for example, the Great Solar Storm of 1859, when a massive solar storm burned telegraph wires all across Europe and the US. The incident was referred to as the 1859 Carrington Flare, and it caused every telegraph signal in two different countries to be completely blacked out. In today’s technology-reliant society, one can’t help but wonder what would happen if such a blackout occurred today. It could take months, if not years, to truly recover.

One of the reasons why these solar storms are so powerful is because of the enormous amount of electro-magnetic waves released by the sun, the same type of waves used in nuclear bombs and EMP devices. These electro-magnetic waves short out any electrical device within the area, and they can throw off any satellite or radio signals in that vicinity.

For better or for worse, our society uses this kind of technology in places like banks, communications, hospitals, computers, transportation systems, as well as in an enormous electrical grid that serves billions of people around the world. If this type of solar eruption were to occur, all memory storage on hard drives and databases could be completely whipped clean.

It’s unthinkable to imagine that a storm could completely shake the foundation of our society, especially when considering how completely dependent we are on technology. As the next solar storm approaches, it’s important to remember that any repeat of the Great Solar Storm of 1859 could bring our modernized society to a screeching halt.

This Sunday morning at 5:30 AM, the Chinese government launched a rocket into space that was carrying a navigation satellite system. This satellite is the fifth of over 30 Beidou orbiters that Beijing hopes will soon rival America’s Global Positioning System (GPS).

For many years, the U.S. Air Force has owned and operated the system that the rest of the world uses for navigation, which has given The United States a huge military advantage. Our Global Positioning System enables our bombs to be guided with unbelievable precision, which makes other countries nervous. With America in control of all GPS satellites, what if the Pentagon decided to mess with the GPS signal in the midst of a war?

The Chinese have now invented a new rival to the GPS system called Beidou, which in Chinese means “compass”. It will allow China to be self-reliant when it comes to global tracking technology.

This Sunday’s satellite launch makes the 5th orbiter out of a total of 30 in the Beidou constellation. Another eight to ten are scheduled to be launched into orbit by 2012, and by 2020, Beidou is supposed to become fully operational. This means China will soon be able to use its own satellite-guided weapons, ones that hit within feet of their target, and stay on track no matter what the weather is like.

Beidou is only one of 3 potential competitors of GPS currently under construction. The European Union’s Galileo project was supposed to have been up and running by the year 2008, but has only been able to launch a few of testing satellites.

Russia had its satellite system consisting of 24 different satellites, which they call GLONASS. It was supposed to up and running by 1995, but 6 years later, only 6 of the satellites were still working, and system was disabled. Russia has launched an effort to rebuild GLONASS that is just about finished. According to the Russian government, twenty-one of their satellites are operational.

With the satellite navigation “arms race” at an all time high, the other countries might give America’s GPS system a run for its money.

Last week, the military went through a massive signal blackout, rendering all their GPS based equipment useless. The signal was only lost for about 10 minutes, but this begs the question: how vulnerable were we for those 10 minutes?

The military is in possession of over 10,000 GPS receivers, which they use on almost all of their equipment. “Anything that moves uses a GPS to track it” says our unknown source within the military. “GPS is so central to war that we just can’t leave home without it”.

According to the Air Force, this signal blackout was due to defective software in conjunction with capability problems. They also stated that none of their weapon systems were harmed from the blackout.

The military uses GPS systems on bombs, armored vehicles, ships, aircraft, and many more defense systems vital to the survival of out soldiers, and during this blackout, we were left near defenseless. What if our enemies gained the technology to duplicate this, causing all our GPS based equipment to be rendered useless. We would be unable to relay positions to one another, unable to know where our vessels were at all times, and we would not be able to drop precision guided missiles.

There have even been attempts in the past in doing so. In 2003, Iraq attempted to use a massive radar jamming machine in the hopes of cutting off the United States’ ability to drop air strikes on them. Luckily, US soldiers were able to get to the weapon and destroy it before it was ever activated. “Our GPS systems have never been breached before, and we are confident that it will never be breached in the future as well” said a spokes person for the military. “We are extremely confident in the safety and security of our GPS systems from all enemy attacks”.

With the growing conflicts in the Middle East, especially with Iran attempting to arm itself with nuclear power, we should all cross out fingered that malfunctions like this never happen again.