Participation Final Report
Paul Acquatella
SGAC Regional Coordinator for South America
During the last week of June, the UN Workshop on the Applications and Uses of GNSS was held in Medellín, Colombia. SGAC was represented by Guatemala’s NPoC, Jeffrey Rivera, and me as the Regional Coordinator for South America thanks to the support from the UN OOSA and the Colombian Air Force.
It was indeed a great workshop and a wonderful opportunity to gather up efforts from the region and share ideas and projects. As a preparatory for the 6th Space Conference of Americas, the workshop counted with several representatives ranging from space agencies, governments institutions, industry and students from all over the continent. The workshop was organized by the Colombian Civil Air Force and the Colombian Space Commission, together with other federal bodies and mechanisms, and with the support from the UN OOSA and the government of the USA. The workshop programme included several topics, beginning with the state of the art of GNSS technologies, passing through the International & Regional Experiences of the use and implementation of GNSS technologies, until Education & Training, International Cooperation and Working Group Sessions.
During the Opening of the workshop, we had the opportunity to receive welcome remarks from the chairmen of the event together with the participation of Ms. Alice Lee, from the UN OOSA, Mr. Jason Kim from the U.S. National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing, Mr. Ciro Arevalo, Chairman of the COPUOS (Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space), and Mr. Ivan Dario Gomez Guzman from the CCE (Colombian Space Commission).
A complete State-of-the-Art of GNSS technologies were presented to the community during the first session of the workshop. First, UN OOSA presented the Programme on Space Applications and the status of the follow-up projects and initiatives since the UN/USA International Meeting of 2004. GPS and GLONASS status and progress, GALILEO and EGNOS programmes developments were also discussed and presented as current state-of-the-art GNSS technologies. Extensive focus was given to the SIRGAS (Geocentric Reference Systems of the Americas) as it represents an enormous regional effort being done since many years. In this session it was also discussed the Interoperability/compatibility from user perspective and regional cooperation in applying GNSS technologies.
Following sessions consisted in the presentation of International and Regional Experiences of the uses and applications of GNSS technologies in several areas such as:
· Civil Aviation and land transportation;
· Surveying, Mapping and Earth Science;
· Precision Agriculture, Water Resource Planning;
· Management of natural resources, the environment and disasters;
· Timing, telecommunications and related applications;
· Education and capacity building (Regional Centres and ICG Information Centres);
· Tele-health and landscape epidemiology.
At the end of the workshop we discussed about education and training on GNSS, regulations, international cooperation and knowledge management, which are for me amongst the most important topics to consider towards the space development for the region. There were presented the UN affiliated Centers for Space Technology Education and the ICG (International Committee on GNSS) Information Centers as means of providing education, support and training in the aforementioned topics. In this session I got the opportunity to make my presentation titled “Hands on Space with SGAC: Enabling Space Development and Education among young people in Developing Countries”. I focused on the SGAC activities and projects being made in the Latin-American community towards the space development and education and our current perspective with the use and applications with GNSS (you can find the presentation here: http://www.spacegeneration.org/files/downloads/UN_Workshops/Paul_Colombi...,
and a full report of my work here: http://www.spacegeneration.org/files/downloads/UN_Workshops/Acquatella_P...).
Acknowledgments
This participation at the United Nations/Colombia/United States of America Workshop on the Applications of Global Navigation Satellite Systems, Medellín, Colombia, June 2008, was possible thanks to the support of the UN-OOSA and the Colombian Air Force (Ms. Alice Lee, Ms. Sharafat Gadimova and Hector Matamoros especially). Also, I would like to thank local organizers of the workshop for this opportunity and the contribution of the SGAC executive and Latin-SG members. Special acknowledgments to the SGAC Executives Agnieszka Lukaszczyk and Alex Karl and So Young Chung, without their support, motivation and guidance this wouldn’t have been possible.
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