The theme for World Space Week 2014 is “Space: Guiding Your Way”. With this theme World Space Week will highlight the benefits of satellite navigation to society. Over recent years society has come to rely heavily on positioning and timing data from a large network of satellites. This dependency will increase even further with the release of multiple new systems on top of the existing Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) network. In 2014 we are seeing Galileo, Glonass and Beidou being added to the global GPS system, while Japan and India have taken more local GNSS satellites into service.
With these new systems we are seeing a tremendous growth of downstream applications being developed for all imaginable professional and personal uses. We are familiar with navigation for planes, trains, ships and cars. We are also getting used to using personal navigation systems such as handheld GPS devices and of course our smart phones. But did you know that agriculture is an inmportant user of GNSS data. And for the timing element of GNSS the worlds of trading and finance depend on clock synchronization from space. Even for the film industry GNSS timing data is used to synchronize cameras fliming the same shot from different angles!
We hope that this theme will offer inspiration for new event organizers all over the world and that World Space Week 2014 may become another record breaking year for the largest public space event on this planet!