The South African Group on Satellite navigations (SA-GSN) is a vehicle to encourage collaboration and the use of Satellite navigations in South Africa.
SA-GSN is a national satellite-based navigations forum, which aims to coordinate and support South African satellite navigations community and their activities across the space value chain.
Globally, numerous navigation systems and services are available for use to map forests, assist farmers to harvest their fields, pilots on airplane to navigate on the ground and in the air, for emergency crews during disasters (i.e fire, floods) to locate people in need of emergency assistance. On the national front, South Africa, through the South African National Space Agency (SANSA) has developed and lead user requirements formulation for the Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) that is used for precision farming.
These systems have varying degrees of performance in terms of the accuracy, availability, continuity, coverage, and integrity, which are essentially dependant on a broad range of technological approaches and techniques. These include amongst other systems and services the following.
- satellite and terrestrial systems,
- wireless and fibre optic networks,
- light detection and ranging (LIDAR),
- atomic clocks.
- specialty radars, and
- vison aided navigation combined with detailed terrain maps,
Nowadays, GPS systems are extremely versatile and can be found in almost any industry sector such as the Aerospace and defence, mining, agriculture, automotives, marine etc.
The role of SA-GSN is to promote the strategic importance of Global Navigation Systems and Systems (GNSS) regional systems, and augmentations and encourage their utilisation, enable the application of satellite technologies in all spheres of daily living for people across South Africa.
The SA-GSN will also seek to position South Africa’s participation international forums such as EGNOSS regional extension and the International Committee on GNSS (ICG) of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The ICG seeks to achieve international cooperation, compatibility, and standardization among the six global systems that are now in operation.
The SA-GSN seeks to coordinate the activities of the satellite navigation community to improve access to satellite navigation data and service including critical infrastructure.
The SAGSN role is to facilitate discussions with the community to set up the processes to identify and unite institutional demands.
SA-GSN advocates, promotes, and facilitates networking of the wider Satellite navigations community in South Africa.
SA-GSN is a voluntary community of local Satellite navigations users. It is established around self-organising Communities of Practice (CoPs).
The navigation systems and applications mostly address the following aspects;
- Location – To be able to determine a position or a location
- Navigation – To get from one location to another along a specific a path
- Mapping – To create maps
- Timing – To know or bring precise/accurate/current timing
- Tracking – To monitor an object/s or their movement
SA-GSN Communities of practice
Click on a community to view it or use the dropdown of actions next to each item.
