National Network of GPS Permanent Stations Cooperation for Research.

MACKERN, MARÍA V; ROBIN, A. M.; LENZANO L. E.

Actas del Primer Encuentro Científico del ICES

Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2006; p. 79 - 86

At the beginning of the GPS the reference frame were five permanent tracking stations belonging to the system owners. The scientific community, mainly driven by geodynamic studies, started installing and maintaining other GPS permanent stations (GPS PS), globally distributed and which information went public through the International GPS Service, IGS. Following this cooperation example, regional networks were installed, in some cases with scientific goals but in many other cases just to afford services to the users? community. As of date the IGS has added 385 GPS permanent stations. Besides, there is a number of GPS PS that have not been incorporated to the IGS but whose observations are of geodetic quality, such as those PS installed with cadastral ends or RTK of GPS Databases, etc. This infrastructure is more and more used in the materialization of terrestrial reference systems because of its superiority over the conventional ways to materialize fixed points nets (passive frames). This work describes firstly the modern concepts of materialization and densification of Reference Systems and how the GPS PS nets arise as the concrete response to this necessity. The superiority of active frames over the traditional passive frames is given in detail. Finally, it shows an application of this active structure through a cooperative project being presently developed in Argentina.