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Chapter VII Other Developments in Geodesy

Many pertinent developments have occurred since the last revision of this publication. This chapter provides a place for subjects of interest that are not discussed in the other chapters. Some of the areas of new geodetic developments are: satellite laser ranging (Chapter VI), lunar laser ranging, very long baseline interferometry, satellite radar altimetry, the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System, satellite-to-satellite tracking, and inertial surveying.

Lunar Laser Ranging

In July 1969, the first men to set foot on the moon performed a number of tasks of scientific importance. Among these tasks was the deployment of a rack structure carrying an array of 100 fused silica retroreflectors designed to return some of the light of a pulsed laser beam to the telescope to which the laser equipment is coupled. These retroreflectors are a part of an Apollo experiment called LURE (Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment. LURE was designed to obtain extremely accurate measurements of the range from known locations on the surface of the earth to the lunar based retroreflectors and enable the improvement of our knowledge of the rotation of the earth and the moon about their center of mass and the moon's librations and motion about the earth.

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Very Long Baseline Interferometry

Observations of extragalactic radio sources such as quasars can provide the geodetic information to determine the vector separations between the antennas of two widely separated radio telescopes. The components of the vector are its length and direction. To accomplish this, it is necessary to measure very accurately the difference in the time of arrival, recorded at the two antennas, of a particular wavefront from a given (point) source of radio radiation. The phenomena called interference, in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), are produced by electronically superimposing the recorded signals to produce a resultant disturbance or "interference" pattern. The theoretical expression for the relative phase delay shows it to be a function of the source direction, the antenna locations, the relative clock error between the two sites, the time of day, the model atmosphere employed, the earth's tidal parameters, the radio frequency at which the observation is made, etc. Proper account must also be taken of the earth's rotation. Two of the main limiting factors in the VLBI technique are clock stability and atmospheric variations. A major goal of VLBI is to reduce the uncertainty in intercontinental baselines to the centimeter level.

VLBI derived baselines have already contributed scale information to the development of the DoD World Geodetic System in 1972. Baselines accurate to the centimeter level would function as standards of comparison for future world systems. Other applications of VLBI include the determination of polar motion, variations in the earth's rotation, and the monitoring of motions of the major plates that compose the earth's crust.