A software developer in the 1990s built a real-time GPS moving map display on a 25MHz 486-SX processor with minimal floating-point math, using the Hipparchus library's integer-based algorithms. The system was significantly faster than consumer GPS devices that emerged years later, but the developer lost access to the project when the client faced financial difficulties.
LAGEOS-1, launched in 1976, is a 407 kg spherical satellite with no electronics or moving parts that serves as a passive reference point for measuring Earth's size, shape, and rotation using laser pulses. Its retroreflector-covered surface reflects light back to ground stations, enabling precise geodetic measurements and tests of general relativity, with an expected orbital lifespan of millions of years.
The US is replacing its official geographic reference systems—the North American Datum of 1983 and the North American Vertical Datum of 1988—with new terrestrial reference frames and a geopotential datum. No physical locations will move, but published coordinates for latitude, longitude, and height will shift by up to four meters due to improvements in satellite positioning and corrections to systematic errors in the older systems.