Instruments & Methods
Finding the Moon: Reference Frames, Optical Sights, and Apollo Navigation
How inertial platforms, optical observations, radio tracking, maps, and reference frames guided Apollo between Earth and Moon.
From the Index
Category: Instruments & Methods
The development and use of surveying instruments, observations, and field methods.
Infrastructure & Engineering
Surveying the Panama Canal, Part 3: Measuring a Living Canal
How hydrography, deformation monitoring, as-builts, and modern geospatial control support an operating and expanding canal.
Infrastructure & Engineering
Surveying the Panama Canal, Part 2: Control, Excavation, Locks, and the Culebra Cut
The survey control, grades, quantities, alignment, and records behind the canal’s locks, dam, and massive excavation.
Infrastructure & Engineering
Before Liftoff: Surveying, Control, and Alignment at a Launch Complex
How construction control, structural monitoring, precision alignment, and verification support a rocket before it leaves the pad.
Instruments & Methods
Surveying the Highest Peak, Part 3: GPS, Geoids, Snow, and the Modern Height of Everest
Why modern Everest measurements depend on GNSS, gravity, snow depth, reference frames, and a clear definition of height.
Instruments & Methods
Surveying the Highest Peak, Part 2: How Peak XV Became Mount Everest
The distant observations, calculations, corrections, and people behind the first accepted height of the world’s highest mountain.
Instruments & Methods
Surveying the Highest Peak, Part 1: Building the Great Trigonometrical Survey
How baselines, giant theodolites, triangulation, and an immense field organization carried a geodetic network across India.