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By Bill Goldston |
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April 2, 2010 -
Joining the likes of world renowned inventors Thomas Edison and
Alexander Graham Bell, to name a few, Roger L. Easton is recognized by
the National Inventors Hall of Fame for pioneering achievements in
spacecraft tracking and timing and navigation technology (TIMATION) that
led to the development of critical enabling technologies of the
NAVSTAR-Global Positioning System (GPS).
“Roger’s career
contributions and his keen ability to develop new, bigger ‘problem sets’
from his experiences are what impressed me most.”
At the award
ceremony hosted by Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property
and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, David
Kappos, March 31, 2010, at the Department of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover
Auditorium, |
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Roger Easton (left) supervising the placement of the Vanguard-1 satellite atop the Viking launch vehicle. (Photo: Business Wire) | ||||
“Roger’s career contributions and his keen ability to develop new,
bigger ‘problem sets’ from his experiences are what impressed me most,”
said long time colleague and current Director of NRL’s
Beginning at NRL in 1943 as a research physicist,
The Vanguard -1 satellite was launched into orbit on March 17, 1958. To
provide a means for determining the space satellite’s orbit, |
Each MINITRACK
station had two interferometer antennas at right angles, one north/south
and the other east/west, with each measuring the direction cosine angle
to the transmitting satellite as it passed through its “fan beam”
antenna pattern. There were six such stations located approximately
along the 75th meridian stretching along the east coast of the
When the Soviet
Union launched Sputnik into orbit, the
“After seeing how
well the very sensitive MINITRACK interferometer antenna field at
Blossom Point, Md., detected and measured reflected 108 MHz radio
frequency energy off the metallic shell of the Sputnik satellite, Roger
quickly put together a proposal to build a new interferometer antenna
system which, in a very short time frame, became the United States’ most
capable system for what we today call ‘Space Situational Awareness’ or
SSA,” said Wilhelm.
NAVSPASUR
stretched from the east coast of the
“As the number of
objects in orbit grew it became apparent to Roger that adding a ‘second
fence’ parallel to the main fence, with an offset of about 90 miles, a
‘one pass’ solution could be provided to determine the object’s orbit.
Roger further improved the accuracy and utility of the data by adding
ranging tones to the transmitted signal at the second fence. This
however required that the receiving and transmitting sites, which were a
number of miles apart, had to be set precisely on the same time base,”
added Wilhelm. “Maintaining the accuracy required turned out to be
difficult to accomplish and led Roger to the vision that the way to do
this was put very good clocks, probably atomic clocks, in satellites,”
he said.
His work
exploiting space-based systems for geodesy, navigation, and timing laid
the foundations for his visionary leap to the concept he dubbed
TIMATION, short for time-navigation. Sponsored by the Naval Air Systems
Command,
NTS-2, the first
satellite to fly in the GPS 12-hour orbit and transmit GPS signals, flew
the first cesium atomic frequency standard in space. Using time
measurements from NTS-2, he experimentally verified Einstein's theory of
relativity. A relativistic offset correction that he applied is still in
use by every satellite in the GPS constellation. While initially
designed for use by the military, GPS has been adapted for civilian use
from commercial airline navigation to portable hand-held and wrist-worn
devices.
GPS today is a
constellation of Earth-orbiting satellites providing precise navigation
and timing data to military and civilian end-users around the globe.
During his career
at NRL Easton was awarded 11 patents. Major awards include: The
Distinguished Civilian Service Award (1960); The Institute of
Navigation's Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow Navigation Award "for outstanding
contribution to the science of navigation for the year 1978.”
1991 The Naval
Space Surveillance Center established the Roger L. Easton Science and
Engineering Award to mark the 30th anniversary of the Naval Space
Surveillance System; National Aeronautic Association's 1992 Robert J.
Collier Trophy presented to the GPS Team composed of NRL, USAF,
Aerospace Corp., Rockwell International and IBM Federal Systems "for the
most significant development for safe and efficient navigation and
surveillance of air and spacecraft since the introduction of radio
navigation 50 years ago" (1993).
The Naval Research
Laboratory established the Roger L. Easton Award for Engineering
Excellence "in recognition of the multiple contributions in engineering
excellence achieved at NRL by and under the leadership of Roger Easton"
(1995); Induction by GPS Joint Program Office into GPS Hall of Fame "for
his overwhelming contributions to engineering applications in navigation
satellite technology [that] have made GPS a reality" (1996); and, The
American Philosophical Society, Magellanic Premium for Navigation "for
development of the Global Positioning System" (1997).
Two years after
leaving Federal service in 1980 and retiring to
In 2005 Easton was
awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George W. Bush for
his invention of the MINITRACK satellite tracking system used to
determine the orbits of early Vanguard satellites; his development of
the Naval Space Surveillance System which remains in use today
cataloging all known man-made space objects orbiting Earth; the
invention of a Navigation System Using Satellites and Passive Ranging
Techniques and his subsequent development of Time Navigation and
Navigation Technology Satellites that formed the technological basis for
modern GPS. |
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