The evolution of location and data collection systems in the United States

Morakis, J. C.; Cote, C. E.

doi:10.2514/6.1973-584

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“…The origins of Argos lie in the 1960s, when meteorologists' ambitions for a global infrastructure of weather monitoring converged with the aspirations of the American and French space programmes. Argos's immediate predecessor was Eole, a short-lived experimental system designed to locate and collect data from sensors carried aboard meteorological balloons (Morakis and Cote, 1973;Sitbon, 1975). Eole was the result of collaboration between the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its French equivalent, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), at a time when the latter was still largely dependent on NASA for technical expertise and for basic satellite launch and operation services (Krige et al, 1987a).…”

Section: Argos and The Meteorological Volume Of Flowsmentioning

confidence: 99%

One infrastructure, many global visions: The commercialization and diversification of Argos, a satellite-based environmental surveillance system

Benson

2012

Soc Stud Sci

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Argos is a satellite-based data collection and location system that has been in operation since the late 1970s; it is the only such system to be dedicated solely to environmental applications. This paper shows how multiple and sometimes conflicting ways of envisioning and studying the global environment have been embodied in the Argos system. In particular, it shows how the system’s initial focus on meeting the needs of meteorologists and oceanographers made it difficult for wildlife biologists, who were interested in tracking the long-distance movements of animals, to use Argos tags. Physical environmental scientists’ vision of the global environment as a ‘volume of flows’ dictated their need for regular, precise, standardized sampling stations distributed in a grid across and above the Earth’s surface. Biologists interested in the interactions of individual animals and populations in a ‘web of life’, in contrast, demanded a flexible system of global access to the movements of individual bodies. Until the mid-1980s, the unit of the French space agency responsible for Argos resisted changes to the system that would have made it easier for biologists to deploy lightweight, low-reliability tags. It was only after the quasi-commercialization of the system in 1986 that it began to make significant concessions to the needs of biologists. The history of Argos suggests that individual infrastructures of environmental observation can host multiple and conflicting global environmental visions and that commercialization, at least within certain constraints, has provided opportunities for such visions to proliferate.

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Section: Argos and The Meteorological Volume Of Flowsmentioning

confidence: 99%

One infrastructure, many global visions: The commercialization and diversification of Argos, a satellite-based environmental surveillance system

Benson

2012

Soc Stud Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

The evolution of location and data collection systems in the United States

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

One infrastructure, many global visions: The commercialization and diversification of Argos, a satellite-based environmental surveillance system

One infrastructure, many global visions: The commercialization and diversification of Argos, a satellite-based environmental surveillance system

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