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Gravity Map of Earth

Posted by michael on from the light-reading dept.

dr3vil writes "Interesting results have been published by the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) project, of the various gravity anomolies that exist at various places on Earth. The BBC report gives a good overview. Fascinating for me, a resident of California, to see us apparently sandwiched between a high and a low spot. Maybe that helps aids the tectonic flows around here?"

1 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sub dectection by whoda · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, inertially navigated submarines DO have a gravity map of the area they are operating in. At least the one's I was on.

    The gravity map values are applied as correction factors to the inertial navigators.

    The gyro's are attracted towards denser areas, which causes precession, which is picked up as an incorrect acceleration, and this throws the position of the inertial navigator off.

    So we basically aplied a correction signal to keep the gyro's orientated to the correct reference planes in the math model so the 'real' accelerations could be correctly calculated.