ALL ROADS LEAD TO CHINA

China set to chart its own GPS course

Beijing: Challenging US monopoly on global positioning systems (GPS), China is set to establish its own satellite navigation system by 2012, covering the Asia-Pacific region. China will become the third country, after US and Russia (it’s system is under restoration), to have its own ‘sat nav’, a Chinese scientist has announced.
    Sun Jiadong, chief designer of the Beidou Navigation System, indicated that China was ready to spend tens of billions of yuan, which would translate into several billion dollars, to put up a network of 30 new satellites in the sky. The local government was looking for markets to sell navigational services in order to finance the project, he said.
    The NAVSTAR GPS allows US to provide commercial navigational services for transportation, telecommunications and other needs. It also allows the US defence to locate and hit terrorists and military targets with missiles in remote areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Chinese scientists have suggested that the focus of their system, called Beidou, will be on storm and earthquake forecasting and disaster rescue operations among other applications.
    “A navigational satellite provides information on distance and time. Using basic triangulation principals, it can compute the distance at which a device, vehicle or person is located. Yes, it has helped the Americans find targets for missile and air strikes,’’ a scientist with the Indian Satellite Research Organization (Isro) told TOI. India does not have a navigational satellite; China has three at present.
    The ‘PLA Daily’, a newspaper run by the People’s Liberation Army, quoted Qi Faren, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, as saying that China was following a threestep strategy, with plans to complete the second stage by 2012. Its plans include putting up five geostationary satellites and 30 non-geostationary satellites by 2020 to ensure global coverage, it said. This will mean more than an 11-fold increase in the number of such satellites from the present level of three.
    The Isro scientist, however, questioned China’s ability to put up several navigational satellites in a short period without preparing the ground for utilizing the new facilities.
    The Beidou System, also know as the Compass Navigation Satellite System, will have the Asia Pacific market open and available to exploit, besides reaping military advantage in a region with four nuclear powers without counting North Korea and Iran.