GPS World

Tag: Antarctica

  • ESNC winner Sensolus keeps Antarctic scientists safe

    Scientists will now wear safety trackers from a Belgium start-up company while working in Antarctica.

    Antarctica is the coldest, windiest and harshest location on Earth. Temperatures can reach –90°C during winter and go down to –20ºC during summer. Winds can reach 250 km/h and visibility can sink to almost zero during whiteouts. With the potential for rapid changes in weather, all outdoor activities must always be done with the greatest care.

    Carrying a SticknTrack location tracker in the pocket from Sensolus, a start-up company from ESA’s Business Incubation Centre in Flanders, will help to keep the researchers safe. The same sensors will also be used to track skidoos, sledges and other equipment used.

    StickNTrack’s developers took third place in the 2014 European Satellite Navigation Competition (ESNC), after taking first in the Flanders regional competition. It also won the European Space Agency’s Innovation Award. The product debuted in August 2015.

    The Belgian Polar Secretariat, Sigfox and Sensolus announced an agreement in January to connect the 2016 Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition to the global Sigfox Internet of Things network.

    “This partnership will allow us to test technology that could be useful for the safety of our operations in Antarctica,” said Rachid Touzani, director of the Belgian Polar Secretariat.

    The expedition includes specialists in glaciology, climatology and geomorphology in charge of various Belgian and international scientific projects. They are hosted at Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth Research Station, 200 kilometers inland in the 2.7 million square kilometers region of Antarctica known as Queen Maud Land.

    The station — designed, built and operated by the International Polar Foundation — is the first polar base that combines eco-friendly construction materials, clean and efficient energy use, optimization of the station’s energy consumption and clever waste management. It can support up to 40 people during the brief Antarctic summer of November to February.

    The team members will work within 40 kilometers of the base and, for the first, 45 GPS-based Sensolus trackers connected to the Sigfox network will allow realtime tracking of their movements, in the often-extreme weather conditions.

    Sigfox ultra-narrow-band communications will secure the link to two antennas at the base station. The information will also be sent to Belgium.

    “Having our extremely battery-efficient StickNTrack GPS trackers at the Princess Elisabeth station is very exciting,” said Sensolus CEO Kristoff van Rattinghe. “We strongly believe that sustaining missions like this is the kind of real innovation we can achieve with the Internet of Things. And this is only possible through strong collaborations like the one set up for this mission.”

    The first results on the contribution of the Sensolus and Sigfox technology to the expedition will be released in March.

  • China Plans BeiDou Ground Station in Antarctica

    China plans to build a BeiDou station in Antarctica this summer, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald. China’s official Xinhua news agency disclosed the plans.

    The facility at Great Wall station in Antarctica will include receivers, auxiliary equipment and a reference station key to improving BieDou’s accuracy, according to the Chinese enews.com website.

    Project leader Wu Xuefeng said the BeiDou facility would greatly improve China’s Antarctic mapping autonomy and improving the system’s precision.

    The BeiDou facility will join others, including Norway’s Trollsat, strategically located in Antarctica to fit that country’s global networks, but which some claim breach the Antarctic Treaty. The treaty says “Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only” and prohibits activities of a military nature.

    Norwegian Bard Wormdal, author of The Satellite War, told Fairfax Media, “The Chinese military wants to use BeiDou for instance for guiding all sorts of missiles. A BeiDou base in Antarctica makes the system more reliable and precise.” He first raised alarm over the Norwegian satellite base at its Troll Antarctic station, which he found had been used by the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

    Russia has three GLONASS ground stations on the continent.

  • ComNav BeiDou+GPS Receiver Provides Positioning in Antarctic

    China’s icebreaker Xuelong, or Snow Dragon, returned to Shanghai April 9 after successfully completing China’s 29th Antarctica scientific expedition. As a high-accuracy GNSS solutions provider, ComNav supplied a GPS+BeiDou GNSS receiver for this expedition. This was the first time that the ComNav GNSS receiver worked in such an extreme environment.

    The reliable performance of the receiver impressed the expedition team. “The fast-searching satellites speed and the accurate positioning result saved us lots of time in the extreme cold field,” said one team member. It was the first time that a BeiDou receiver was used in the Antarctic, according to ComNav.

    The research vessel left the southern port city of Guangzhou on November 5, 2012, for Antarctica. It covered 29,000 nautical miles over its 156-day southern voyage, among which 6,000 nautical miles were in ice regions. A total of 239 researchers on board completed 53 research tasks on biology, ecology, geophysics, ocean, climate, environment and glacier, and engineering construction missions.