(image: Korea Bizwire)
SEOUL, Apr. 23 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korea is speeding up the development of its own global positioning system (GPS) that will be more accurate and offer greater coverage for users, the government said Sunday.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said it will hold talks with representatives from the U.S. Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) at the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal this week.
“The meetings that will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday are to be technical conferences on the Korea Augmentation Satellite System, or KASS, which could have a accuracy rate of about a meter,” the ministry claimed. This is significantly better than the margin of error of several meters for existing global location tracking systems.
KASS is Seoul’s take on the Satellite Based Augmentation System that is designed to reduce errors in finding a precise location using GPS. It is expected to go into service in the latter half of 2020 and provide full coverage for Korea.
KASS employs geostationary satellite over the Korean Peninsula and can be used by planes, drones, ships, mobile and vehicle navigation devices and even smartphones.
“The country has developed GPS for roads, the surrounding sea and for general measurements for surveyor work, but such services do not have full nationwide reach,” the ministry said. It said these were not well suited for isolated, mountainous regions, or for boats far out to sea.
Government officials said that once the country gets the “Pseudo Random Noise” code it will start the process of inputting it into KASS. The country is aiming for a full-fledged testing of the system in 2019.
(Yonhap)
