New GPS satellite launched

The AP reported that a new, third-generation GPS satel­lite was suc­cess­fully launched for the United States Air Force from Florida. As I men­tioned on 17 March 2008, the Air Force has a lot on its plate these days. The new satel­lite weighs two tons, is 11 meters long and 2 meters wide. The aver­age GPS satel­lite has an 8 year life span, so the Air Force must launch replace­ments on a reg­u­lar sched­ule to main­tain the 24-satellite sys­tem. See How­Stuff­Works and NASA for more infor­ma­tion about how the Global Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem actu­ally works.

Tagged as: GPS, hardware, space, telecom, USA