The 50th Space Wing at Schriever AFB, Colo., completed the transition from the legacy Global Positioning System ground control segment to the new Architecture Evolution Plan ground system last week with no disruption in service to GPS users, reports SSgt. Don Branum. Last month, officials at the Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles explained the transition process, which had been in the works for more than a year. This was a critical conversion that took GPS from a 1970s-based mainframe technology to a distributed computing architecture that will ease future changes. “The control segment is what develops the navigation signal and keeps the timing signal correct,” said Lt. Col. Janet Grondin, SMC GPS operational control segment program manager. She added, “You can’t get that wrong.”
The Air Force kicked off one of its biggest exercises this week with the latest edition of Bamboo Eagle, featuring combined virtual and live training scenarios focused on test the command-and-control “nervous system” leaders need to operate on a complex joint battlefield spread over vast distances.
