General Relativity Advances the Development of GPS

When driving their cars in cities other than the one that they live in, how can people find out the way to their destinies? Perhaps they will use maps and compasses, or they can ask the pedestrians for instructions. Such ways will definitely work, yet, nowadays, a new way of navigating, the global positioning system, has arose, gradually gaining its popularity among car drivers and travelers. Behind the booming of using global positioning system stands the General Relativity, a theory that enhanced the developments of GPS. The discovery of General Relativity has opened a new era of navigations: the time of GPS, the global positioning system.
As a rather young operating system, GPS has a history of less than sixty years. During the cold war when USA and USSR competed in space racing, on October 4th, 1957, the launch of Sputnik 1, a satellite controlled by USSR, symbolized the beginning of human’s explorations of navigations using scientific technologies (Kumar and Moore 59). In response to USSR's ambitions, USA started the NAVSTAR GPS Satellite Constellation Program, aiming in tracking the positions of every individuals on Earth. “No one realized that [this program] that began its research and development in 1973 and launching [sic] its first four satellites in 1978 would change the very nature of our world in the next two decades” (Kumar and Moore 59).
GPS works in a rigorous way that drastically lessens the complexity of navigations. Because of the developments of GPS, car drivers can figure out their routes by simply moving fingers on the touching screens of the GPS receivers, much more convenient than using maps or compasses. Two main components work in the GPS: the GPS satellites and the GPS receivers (Trefil 52). The GPS sat...

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