Transit Satellites

Using Frequency to Find Position

The Transit system, initially designed to provide precise positioning for the
Polaris submarine fleet, depended on noting changes in Doppler frequency shift.
During the 15 minutes it took a Transit satellite to pass from horizon to horizon,
navigators on a ship or submarine measured the Doppler shift in the satellites
radio transmissions to produce a fix of their position.
Mathematician Bill Guier and physicist George Weiffenbach told APL Research
Center director Frank T. McClure about using Doppler tracking for Sputnik.
McClure suggested that a navigator could use signals from a known satellite
position to determine his location anywhere in the world. This idea became the
basis for Transit.
The TRANSIT system, also known as NAVSAT (for Navy Navigation
Satellite System), was the first satellite navigation system to be used
operationally. The system was primarily used by the U.S. Navy to
provide accurate location information to its Polaris ballistic missile
submarines, and it was also used as a navigation system by the
Navy's surface ships, as well as for hydrographic and geodetic
surveying. Transit provided continuous navigation satellite service from
1964, initially for Polaris submarines and later for civilian use as well.
Determining ground location
The basic operating principle of TRANSIT is similar to the system used
by emergency locator transmitters, except their transmitter is on the
ground and the receiver is in orbit. Details on the signal are forwarded
directly to ground stations, which then generate a fix on the transmitter
using a process similar to TRANSIT.
The TRANSIT system satellites broadcast two UHF carrier signals that
provided precise time hacks (every two minutes), plus the satellite's six
orbit elements and orbit perturbation variables. The orbit ephemeris and
clock corrections were uploaded twice each day to each satellite from
one of the four Navy tracking and injection stations. This broadcast
information allowed a ground receiver to calculate the location of the
satellite at any point in time. Use of two carriers permitted ground
receivers to reduce navigation errors caused by ionospheric refraction.
The Transit system also provided the first world-wide time-keeping
service, allowing clocks everywhere to be synchronised with 50 micro-
second accuracy.
The transit satellite broadcast on 150 and 400 MHz. The two frequencies
were used to allow the bending of the satellite radio beacons by the
ionosphere to be canceled out, thereby improving location accuracy.
The critical information that allowed the receiver to compute location was
a unique frequency curve caused by the Doppler effect. The Doppler
effect caused an apparent compression of the carrier's wavelength as
the satellite approached the receiver, and stretching of wavelengths as
the satellite receded. The spacecraft traveled at about 17,000 mph,
which could increase or decrease the received carrier signal by as much
as 10 kHz. This Doppler curve was unique for each location within line-
of-sight of the satellite. For instance, the earth's rotation caused the
ground receiver to move toward or away from the satellite's orbit,
creating a non-symmetric Doppler shift for approach and recession,
allowing the receiver to determine whether it was east or west of the
satellite's north-south ground track.
Calculating the most likely receiver location was not a trivial exercise.
The navigation software used the satellite's motion to compute a 'trial'
Doppler curve, based on an initial 'trial' location for the receiver. The
software would then perform a least squares curve fit for each two-
minute section of the Doppler curve, recursively moving the trial position
until the trial Doppler curve 'most closely' matched the actual Doppler
received from the satellite for all 2-minute curve segments.
If the receiver was also moving relative to the earth, such as aboard a
ship or airplane, this would cause mismatches with the idealized Doppler
curves, and degrade position accuracy. However, positional accuracy
could usually be computed to within 100-meters for a slow-moving ship,
even with reception of just one two-minute Doppler curve. This was the
navigation criterion demanded by the U.S. Navy, since American
submarines would normally expose their UHF antenna for only 2-
minutes to obtain a usable Transit fix. The U.S. Submarine version of the
Transit System also included a special encrypted (and more accurate)
version of the downloaded satellite's orbital data. This enhanced data
allowed for considerably enhanced system accuracy (not
unlike Selective Availability <SA> under GPS). Using this enhanced
mode accuracy was typically less than 20 meters. (BetweenLORAN
C and GPS.) Certainly, the most accurate navigation system of its day.
Determining the satellite orbits[edit]
A network of ground stations, whose locations were accurately known,
continually tracked the transit satellites. They measured the Doppler shift
and transferred the data to 5 hole paper tape using standard teleprinter
hole convention. This data was sent to the Satellite Control Center at
Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland using commercial and
military teleprinter networks. The data from the fixed ground stations
provided the location information on the transit satellite orbit. Locating a
transit satellite in earth orbit from a known ground station using the
Doppler shift is simply the reverse of using the known location of the
satellite in orbit to locate an unknown location on the earth, again using
the Doppler shift .
A typical ground station occupied a small Quonset hut. The accuracy of
the ground station measurements was a function of the ground station
master clock accuracy. Initially a quartz oscillator in a temperature
controlled oven was used as the master clock. The master clock was
checked daily for drift using a VLF receiver tuned to a US Navy low
frequency VLF station. The VLF signal had the property that the phase
of the VLF signal did not change from day to day at noon along the path
between the transmitter and the receiver and thus could be used to
measure oscillator drift. Later rubidium beam and cesium beam clocks
were used. Ground stations had number names; for example, Station
019 was McMurdo Station, Antarctica. For many years during the 1970s
this station was staffed by a graduate student and an undergraduate
student, typically in electrical engineering, from the University of Texas
at Austin. Other stations were located at New Mexico State University,
the University of Texas at Austin, Sicily, Japan, Seychelles Island, Thule
Greenland and a number of other locations. The Greenland and
Antarctica stations saw every pass of every transit satellite because of
their near pole location for these polar orbiting satellites.