As a layman journalist (and calculus dropout) interested in the history of navigation, I find it noteworthy that the conclusion of MH370 was written using three of the oldest forms of navigation. 1) distance = time x speed (the concentric circles), 2) dead reckoning (NTSBs possible flight paths), and 3) the Doppler effect (the southern route). Regarding 3) it was two physicists at the Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, George Weiffenbach and Bill Guier, who noted the Doppler effect of Sputnuk in 1957. They were soon able to predict the time and path of Sputnik’s 96-minute orbit. Six months later, their boss, Frank McClure, asked them if they could invert the data from a known orbit to find the position of the lab. They figured it out in two days, with an accuracy of one-tenth of a mile. The lab won a Navy contract to build Doppler-tone satellites to communicate with Polaris submarines. The first handmade satellites, launched in 1959, formed the Transit system, the first step toward satellite navigation. (From my little eBook HERE WE ARE: The History, Meaning and Magic of GPS.) Heres a Facebook page from Malaysia with diagrams of the Doppler calculations.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 16:00:23 +0000
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