February Luncheon 2/13/2014

Just as a reminder notice for the next speaker for February 13, 2014.  If you have responded, I have you on the list.  I have confirmed we will be meeting at Northrop Grumman on Col Glenn (same place as January’s luncheon different conference room) and catering will be from City BBQ for $8 per person (same price as last month).  We will return to the Mustang Room at the Hope Hotel for this meeting.  The menu is roast pork loin with redskin potatoes and the cost will be $13 ($11 for students).  The meeting time is the same starting @11:30 and lunch starting @12:00.

For February, our featured presenter will be Ms. Rachael Morton discussing Investigating Solar Storm Impacts on GPS. Below is her abstract and bio:

Solar storms are natural phenomena that can disturb the Earth’s atmosphere and interfere with radio signals traveling from the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) satellites to receivers on the surface of the Earth.   Because of the widespread use of GPS, it is important to know the extent of the impact of solar storms on GPS, so that we can be better prepared for these unavoidable natural events.  In this project, GPS stations distributed at high latitude areas were utilized to obtain raw GPS measurements during solar storms.  Over 350MB of data were selected, downloaded, and then submitted to Canadian Natural Resources, a Canadian Government sponsored service, for online processing to generate each station’s precise coordinates.   During a solar storm, solar and geomagnetic disturbances distort GPS signals propagating through the Earth’s atmosphere.  The distorted signals will introduce errors in the computed GPS station coordinates.   By analyzing the errors in the station coordinate solutions, we can establish quantitative relationships between the intensity of a solar storm, the geographic location of receivers, and the level of impact of the solar storm on GPS.   Based on data recorded during 3 solar storms from over 50 GPS stations in northern and southern hemisphere high latitude areas, this report demonstrates that the number of rejected receiver measurements and the number of rejected bias estimations needed for precise position calculations have excellent potential for serving as useful indicators of GPS stress caused by the impact of solar storms.  Furthermore, these indicators can also be used to monitor the level and intensity of solar storms at high latitudes.

Rachael Morton is a senior at Talawanda High School in Oxford, OH.  She started taking college classes since entering high school and has completed 63 credit hours of Miami University classes. She conducted a research project to investigate solar storm impacts on GPS receiver performance. The results are published and have been presented at the 2014 Institute of Navigation International Technical Meeting and she won an Intel Talent Search Research Report Badge for this project.   She was also a Wright Scholar at AFRL in the summer of 2013 and worked under the guidance of Dr. Juan Vasquez on target tracking software performance evaluations.  Currently, she is working on a bioinformatics project with Dr. John Karro in the Computer Science Department at Miami University.  Rachael is an avid tennis player who has been named the Player of Year in the South West Ohio Conference for the last two consecutive seasons.  At her spare time, she enjoys piano, violin, and singing.

If interested please RSVP for the first meeting by Monday February 10, 2014, if not interested no response needed.

ION coffee mugs are now available for purchase for $7.  But with your RSVP for this month’s luncheon by the deadline, you can buy an ION mug at the door for the discounted price of just $5!  That’s a 29% discount!  They’ll go fast!

*******************************************************************************

Check out the website (dayton2.ion.org).

If your contact info needs updating or you need to be removed from the email list, please let me know.

2013-2014 sponsors:

GNSS Solutions, Ltd.

Institute of Navigation

Miami University

Modern Technology Solutions, Inc. (MTSI)

Northrop Grumman Corp.

Ohio University AEC

*********************************************************************************

 

Brian Roadruck

Dayton ION Chapter Secretary

Brian.roadruck@afit.edu