Life Member’s Night / Soirée des Membres à Vie
Then to Now: Forty Years of GPS
By / par
Pierre Héroux, Section Head, Geodetic Analysis and Development Section, Geodetic Survey Division, NRCan
Pierre will take you on a journey looking back at forty years of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), summarizing the evolution of satellite-based positioning since the launch of the first GPS satellite in 1978. His timeline will include major events that affected the deployment of the GNSS constellations, and he will review trends in adoption of the technology. There is no better person to tell us about the impact GNSS technology has had on methods applied for control surveys. Modern online services for on-demand access to high precision positioning will be presented as well. As GPS becomes ubiquitous in many systems that spatially enable modern life, this presentation will be a good reminder of how much the technology has, in a relatively short time, evolved and become such an intrinsic part of our daily lives.
Pierre Héroux has over thirty years of experience in developing GNSS software for precise positioning and managing the delivery of geodetic services. He holds a Bachelor of Sciences (Géodésie) degree from l'Université Laval (1981) and a Master of Sciences (Surveying Engineering) from the University of New Brunswick (1997).
His expertise lies mainly in the field of space geodesy, specializing in scientific applications of Global Navigation Satellite Systems, in particular the Global Positioning System (GPS).
In keeping with the theme of the evening we will have on hand a display with old movies (digitized) and pictures from the pre-GPS control survey days to remind us how we've come so far in such a "short" time!