Description
The science of Geodesy is at the heart of all accurate horizontal and vertical positioning. The development of the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) and other space-based positioning and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) provides us with capacity to locate virtually anything, anywhere at any time to within a few centimeters. Understanding the basic principles of physical and geometric geodesy is vital to being able to accurately describe the vast amounts of high accuracy positioning information that is being collected and shared all around the world. This course will review the historical development of our knowledge of the size and shape of the Earth and the fundamental design of horizontal and vertical datums and their realization.
Learning Objectives
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- Why the Earth is not a sphere.
- Early efforts to measure the size and shape of the Earth
- Why there different ellipsoid models of the Earth
- Types of geodetic datums
- How datums are realized
- Who is responsible for geodetic datums in the United States
