Satellite Navigation Pioneer Roger Lee Easton Snr Dies

[Darren]

Roger Lee Easton Snr is a name few of you will be familiar with, but you should be. Whilst working as a scientist for the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory he came up with the idea of using satellites to calculate position using precision clocks.

His patent, 'Navigation System Using Satellites and Passive Ranging Techniques' was submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in October 1970 and forms the basis of the satnav networks we all now use in our daily lives.

In his early career Roger works on radar and blind landing system technologies before progressing to satellite tracking. It was on this project that he resolved a problem with the idea of placing high precision clocks onboard satellites and from that he developed the idea of using these close to calculate the position of a ground based location.

Roger retired in 1980 although he continued to work on GPS improvements. He passed away on May 8th at his home in Hanover, New Hampshire.

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Darren Griffin

[pillboxman]

That's very sad for two reasons-

1 Sad that he has passed away.
2 That he did so in relative obscurity, he should be celibrated in some way, though for the life of me I cannot think how.

Any thoughts fellow GPSers?

John

[FireFlyII]

If you're in the DC region, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum has a Time and Navigation display you can tour, I think it has a model of one of Easton's satellites and other historical artifacts. Also, there is a good bit of information on the Naval Research site: nrl.navy.mil

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