Inventors of GPS win 2019 Queen Elizabeth prize for Engineering

Announcing the winners of the prestigious £1m award, which was established to celebrate the global impact of engineering on humanity, Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation said: “We’ve awarded this prize to a set of people who’ve invented a system to enable us to know where we are, what time it is, and where we’re going. Everything in the modern world, from transportation to banking, agriculture, medicine, the smart phone in our pockets – all of it relies on this technology. They’ve rewritten, in a major way, the infrastructure of our world."

Developed though a US department of defence project which began life in 1973, GPS uses a constellation of at least 24 orbiting satellites, ground stations and receiving devices. Each satellite broadcasts a radio signal containing its location and the time from an on-board atomic clock. GPS receivers need signals from at least four satellites to determine their position, they measure the time delay in each signal to calculate the distance to each satellite, then use that information to pinpoint the receivers location on earth. Each satellite makes a near circular orbit around the globe twice a day, equally spaced around the equator, allowing users from virtually anywhere on Earth to access the system.