Hello and

welcome to module 1-3 of the GPS MOOC.

Before you get started learning
the serious technical details of GPS,
we're just going to take this video
to tell you about the joy of GPS.
And what do I mean by that?
Well, here's the outline
of our video today and,
and this video today is not
the outline of the course.
We just did that a couple of videos ago.
But this is to give you a feel for
what the science of GPS is like.
Just a little taste of what it's like.
And the way I'm going to do that is
first of all show you how simple it is.
That you, you can you just use one slide
to explain to the basics of how GPS works.
Yet it's deceptive.
There's no end to the details of it.
So, it's, it's simple but very deep.
And as you dig into the details of GPS
you find that it's very beautiful.
And so I'll explain those two things and
in the, along the way you'll
see how GPS brings together technology,
science and culture and
that there's a technology transition
going on right now that will benefit you.
And then finally, we'll get into some
of what makes it deep and beautiful.
So, here is the promised single
slide explanation of how GPS works.
GPS signal starts at the satellite and
travels to the Earth in
about 70 milliseconds.
And your GPS receiver will
observe this phase change.
You'll notice this signal
has a phase change in it.
Your GPS receiver will observe that and
by knowing the delay between
when the signal was sent and
when it was received, this value which
we'll talk about throughout the course,.
By knowing that delay,
multiplying by the speed of light,
we know how far we are from the satellite.
By knowing how far we are from
several known points,
we can work out where we are,
and that's it.
That's how GPS works.
Very simple.
So before going into some of the deeper
details, I want to give you a little
snapshot of some uses of GPS that
maybe you're not so familiar with.
You're probably all familiar
with navigating in your cars or
using GPS to geotag your photographs or
something like that but
GPS is used in a whole range of sciences
including geoscience and an example of
this is something called the continuing,
continually operating reference stations.
And what these are,
are these things known as monuments which
are tall concrete pillars that
are concreted deep into the ground and
stand up about as high as a person.
And on top of that is a GPS antenna as
you can see in this picture right here,
and these placed all over the world and
they do differential GPS and
can measure their location to
an accuracy of millimeters.
And as a result of that,
they can measure crustal deformations so
you can go and see how the Earth's
crust is moving thanks to GPS.
And a byproduct of this is that
when the crust moves a lot,
we get to see it thanks to GPS.
And a recent example of this came
about from the earthquake that happened
near the Fukushima power plant in Japan,
the epicenter of the earthquake
was a place called Tohoku Japan.
And that was a, a large earthquake as I'm
sure you remember the nuclear power plant
got severely damaged and is still in a,
in a bad state, but from the scientific
point of view those reference stations
that I just talked about measured
that the motion on at their
locations all over the earth for
the five hours, five hours subsequent
to that earthquake and in a paper
by Greg Beroza of Stanford geophysics
department this plot was presented.
And what this plot is, is the amount
of displacement from normal for
each of the different reference stations
and on the vertical axis we what's shown
here is the arc distance from
Tohoku Japan in degrees.
So for example if you antupdial point
somewhere of a South America or
near South America.
You'd be 180 degrees away,
it's the furthest you can get is 180 and
then you'd start moving back.
And we are in Stanford California if you
measure the arc distance there's it's
73 degrees and so our line is one of these
here and so what this shows if we follow.
That line is that after about
an hour from the earthquake,
we move by about about this much.
And that is about 2 centimeters.
And you can see this wave propagating
around the Earth, and back and
then back again for five hours.
The remarkable thing about this is that
thanks to the GPS measurements we know
that every one of us unless we
are in an airplane at the time
was moved by this earthquake,
by several centimeters.
Which is just gives you quite a profound
feeling for the magnitude of this thing.
So that's just an example
of some of the science and
then culturally, you'll know that
GPS has become embedded in our
culture Facebook is always
encouraging you to check in and
find where your friends are you might
use is for navigation all the time,
people use it for running and cycling and
hiking, For geotagging your pictures, and
just a couple of hours ago my phone
buzzed me and said exactly this.
This was the screen of my
phone a couple of hours ago.
Time to leave for your MOOC recording
session in order to arrive on
time based on current traffic,
and it worked.
Here I am.
So let's take a look at
the technology evolution of GPS.
GPS began,
the system began over 30 years ago and
in 1978 we had the first portable GPS
receiver which wasn't very portable.
You see it there at 25 pounds
backpack that's 11 kilograms,
that was just a GPS receiver, and
then 1989 about a decade later
you had the first commercial hand held
receiver which cost $1000 there it is.
Is a made by Magellan.
And then through the 90s
we saw the proliferation of
In-Car Nav Systems maybe you owned one.
And then in the late 2000s
we started to get GPS in smart
phones this was in fact the very
first smart phone with GPS it's
the HP Ipac shown on the screen there.
And the GPS went inside it
in a small board that you,
that is shown on the screen.
So that was in 2005 and
now in 2014 every smart phone has GPS
in it and one of the reasons is that
the the entire GPS circuitry is on
a single chip in all those smart phones.
That's two millimeters big and so
that's shown on the screen a little
black dot in that last white picture.
And I've actually got one of
those chips here and you,
you can't even see it which
is sort of the point.
It's two millimeters
by two millimeters and
that's what the GPS is like
inside your smartphone.
So, what we're seeing is that a technology
transition is happening right now.
Navigation is a field that for millenia,
was the province of the elite.
It was done by officers in navies and
armies, and it was done literally
by priests in times gone by.
And now, everybody is a navigator.
You've got your smart phone or tablet,
and you can find your way around.
And so navigation,
the field of navigation,
thanks to GPS,
is moving towards the masses.
So that's cool, but it's quite
profound when you think about it,
because this kind of thing happens very
rarely, and there's two famous examples.
Literacy was something very similar.
It was the province of
the priesthood basically.
Scribes knew how to read and
write and the masses did not, and
the printing press changed that and
allowed the masses to become literate.
And that happened around 1500 and
completely changed the world.
And computing went like that.
Computers used to exist as mainframes,
and in a way it had its own priesthood.
There were people in universities
who looked after those computers and
would not let anyone else near them.
And then in the 80s the personal computer
brought computing to the masses.
And so a similar transition is going
on with navigation thanks to GPS and
the significance is that if you in
middle of one of these transitions,
you have an opportunity for
tremendous things to happen.
You can get rich,
you can do great science.
And you are in the middle of
this transition right now.
So now,
let's move back to the science and, and
look at how while it's very simple,
it can get very deep very quickly.
And so, let's just go back to
the beginning and say, how does GPS works?
Satellite transmit there positions.
You measure ranges.
Several ranges give you your position.
That's very simple.
And then through this course we'll learn
about something called assisted GPS, and
that can be could be
summarized equally simply.
That instead of the satellites
giving you their positions,
a network such as a cellular network
can give you the satellite positions.
And the picture for that looks like this.
That you have a satellite sending
a measurement that you just take
a range from and instead of getting
the data from the satellite,
you get the data from some
cell tower shown here.
And the data would come to you from
the cell tower which happens quicker and
easier than getting it from the satellite.
And so ce, cell tower tells
you the satellite's position.
You still measure your range from the
satellite and get your location as before.
Simple as that.
But this knowledge ask one of the first
questions that'll take us deeper.
How do we know the satellite positions?
How does the cell tower know?
How does the satellite itself
know what position it's at?
Well, to answer that question we have
to go back in history to the people who
worked out the science of orbits.
And it all began with a gentleman
named Tycho Brahe who was Danish, and you
see his picture here on a Danish stamp.
And he made very precise observations
of the planets and documented them.
And that information was
used by Joanas Kepler,
shown here on a German stamp and
the observations from Tuko Brahe was so
accurate that this allowed Kepler to work
out his famous three laws which are,
Kepler's First Law,
we'll write K1 is that.
All planets orbit the sun in ellipses.
With the sun at one of
the foci of the ellipse.
Kepler second law is that planets
will sweep out areas that
are equal in equal amounts of time so
that's what's shown
on this drawing here in some time
t this area a in the same amount
of time you'll get the same area here and
if the planet goes further
from the sun in that elliptical
orbit in that amount of time.
The area a there and that's the
significance of that which you should be
able to see here is that the planet
goes faster when it's closer to
the thing it's orbiting around in this
case the sun and slower when it's further.
So, Kepler's Second Law
is equal areas in equal time.
And Kepler's Third, Third relates
the period of the entire orbit to
the semi major axis of the orbit and
it tells that the period squared is
proportional to
the semi-major access cube.
And I've taken the trouble
to write these down,
because the famous physicist
Richard Feynman said that,
not only should engineers know all of
Kepler's three laws, but anyone graduating
from college should know these three laws
in order to consider themselves educated.
And seeing as we're in the business of
satellites, we should certainly know them.
So I've placed them there, but
the significance in our story,
about knowing orbits, is that
once Kepler had used Brahe's observations
to come up with his three laws,
it allowed Isaac Newton to postulate
his law of gravity shown here.
So here's Isaac Newton's
law of gravity that says,
any two bodies attract each
other with a force F that's
proportional to the mass of the one body
times the mass of the other body and
inversely proportional to the distance
between their centers squared.
So, how did Newton come up with this?
Well he came up with
it by studying Kepler.
And he showed that if you have this law,
then you could replicate Kepler's laws,
you could, you could recover Kepler's
laws and that's what this drawing is.
This drawing here is,
was drawn by Isaac Newton it's in his book
Principia Mathematica listed down here and
you could actually go and
download that book from the internet and
see for yourself this drawing
drawn by Isaac Newton.
And what he's doing here is
showing Kepler's Second Law.
It's showing that you can get the ellipse
and you get equal areas in equal time.
And thanks to this, we know that the force
that moves the planets around and
now a days the GPS satellites, is the very
same force that makes the apples fall and
there's Newton commemorated
by the apple on the stamp.
And so why do we care?
Well, this is how we know
where satellites are.
We begin at this point
with a reference network.
So each of the satellite
operators such as for
example the US Airforce who
put the first system up.
They put up the satellites and
then they observe measurements from
a reference network of observing stations,
and see where the satellites are and
then apply Newton's law to propagate
where they will be in the future.
So, they calculate, using Newton,
they calculate precise positions,
analogous to Cobrie
observing the positions.
The operator of any system
calculates the future position.
And then they have precise data and
using that precise data they
pack it into Keplerian format you
will learn about in this course and
that information is transmitted
from the satellite or
from the cell tower and that's how we
know where the satellite positions are.
So there's this very beautiful link.
Of the most famous space scientist
of antiquity through to today.
And so, you might be saying oh,
that's nice but
I don't really care about history,
what about modern science?
Well, there are clock calculations
that must be taken into account too.
And this is what brings
us to modern physics.
And specifically we have to take
into account Einstein's theory of
general relativity and special relativity.
Now the reason for this is that
the GPS system works because there
are very precise clocks in
each of the satellites.
And they are synchronized with
each other to nanoseconds and
they need to be because light
travels 1 foot in 1 nanosecond.
So if 30,
by 30 centimeters in 1 nanosecond.
So to get the kind of accuracy that we
want in GPS, we need very precise clocks.
However, we know that according
to Einstein's theory of
general relativity when gravity gets
less time literally goes faster.
Time is more free where gravity is
less literally time literally goes
faster when there's less gravity and
where the satellites are,
there is enough less gravity that time
goes faster by 45 microseconds each day.
So, if this were somehow not accounted for
it would make a very big difference
to the system because light travels
300 meters in 1 microsecond,
so light would travel 300 meters times
45 microseconds and you'd be making,
you'd be finding the satellite
to be kilometres further away or
closer than you expected if you,
if this was all wrong.
Also there's, Einstein had his theory
of special relativity that says as
objects move faster time slows down.
And the satellites move about 3
kilometres per second relative to us and
relative to the earth.
And so time slows down by 7 microsecond's
per day because of special relativity,
so the combination of those two
means that at the satellite's,
time goes by faster by 38
microsecond's each day.
And so each GPS satellites
literally is programmed so
that it's clock runs slow on earth
by 38 microseconds each day so
that when it gets up into orbit,
because of general and special relativity
it'll run faster by 38 microseconds and
therefore run at the expected speed.
So that in itself is quite profound and
amazing.
But there's more.
There are eccentric variations in the
orbit is, in particular the orbit won't be
perfectly circular and at some stage
the satellite will be slightly
further away and going slightly slower or
slightly closer and going slightly faster.
And because of the change in gravity and
the change in speed from those small
variations these adjustments that,
that have to be made have
to themselves be adjusted.
And that is something that happens in real
time, can't be programmed in advance.
And we use the orbits that,
that are given to us to
know what the adjustment has to be and
here is some code.
This is the kind of code
that is in your cell phone,
every time you use your GPS
this code is exercised and
if we look at what's inside here we'll
see there's this term ek which is
something known as the eccentric anomaly
and you'll learn about that later.
But what you can see right now it's solved
for by something called Kepler's equation,
and so
it tells us how eccentric the orbit is and
so that term goes into
an equation along with
this relativistic term to work out how
much to adjust the clock correction.
So there's a clock correction and
so what you see here, is Kepler.
And so you've got Kepler up here, and
you've got Einstein [SOUND] down here.
And maybe,
in no other discipline that you will do in
your life will you see Kepler and
Einstein combined on the same page.
And this is not even
just on the same page.
Here we have them combined
in the same line of code.
How cool is that?