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34-449: The company prospered and was sold by Salvatori to Litton Industries in 1960. In 1987, Litton and Dresser Industries formed a joint venture comprising Western and Dresser Atlas . The joint venture, Western Atlas , was spun off as a public company in 1994. Western then purchased Halliburton Geophysical Services, which had been formed from Geophysical Service Incorporated , Geosource and several other companies. In 1998, Western Atlas

68-536: A leader in the military guidance and is involved in projects for most divisions of the US military. On August 10 of 1961 NASA awarded MIT a contract for preliminary design study of a guidance and navigation system for Apollo program . (see Apollo on-board guidance, navigation, and control system, Dave Hoag, International Space Hall of Fame Dedication Conference in Alamogordo , N.M., October 1976 ). Today's space shuttle guidance

102-502: A mixture of the two remains. In the summer of 1952, Dr. Richard Battin and Dr. J. Halcombe ("Hal") Laning Jr. , researched computational based solutions to guidance as computing began to step out of the analog approach. As computers of that time were very slow (and missiles very fast) it was extremely important to develop programs that were very efficient. Dr. J. Halcombe Laning, with the help of Phil Hankins and Charlie Werner, initiated work on MAC, an algebraic programming language for

136-522: A much larger business, with major shipyards , and manufacturing microwave ovens . It was founded in 1953 by American business executive Charles Bates "Tex" Thornton alongside his associates Roy Ash and Hugh Jamieson. Headquartered in Beverly Hills, California , the original name of the company was 'Electro Dynamics Corporation.' In 1954, with a loan from the Lehman Brothers , Thornton acquired

170-457: A net income of $ 218 million for the 2000 fiscal year. On December 21, 2000, in a joint statement, Litton Industries and Northrop Grumman announced that the latter will acquire Litton Industries shares in a transaction worth $ 5.1 billion. The transaction was completed on May 31, 2001 and Northrop Grumman officially acquired Litton Industries. A provisional list of Litton Industries' major divisions: Guidance system A guidance system

204-602: A proper heading . This is then fed to the outputs which can directly affect the system's course. The outputs may control speed by interacting with devices such as turbines , and fuel pumps , or they may more directly alter course by actuating ailerons , rudders , or other devices. Inertial guidance systems were originally developed for rockets. American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard experimented with rudimentary gyroscopic systems. Dr. Goddard's systems were of great interest to contemporary German pioneers including Wernher von Braun . The systems entered more widespread use with

238-590: A report on the MAC system, it is a reasonable speculation that the space shuttle language is named for Jim's old mentor, and not, as some have suggested, for the electronic superstar of the Arthur Clarke movie "2001-A Space Odyssey." (Richard Battin, AIAA 82–4075, April 1982) Hal Laning and Richard Battin undertook the initial analytical work on the Atlas inertial guidance in 1954. Other key figures at Convair were Charlie Bossart,

272-515: A revenue of $ 393.8 million. In December 1964, Litton acquired Royal McBee. In 1969, the company acquired Triumph-Adler , a major typewriter manufacturer based in Germany and the sixth-largest European office equipment manufacturer at the time. In 1973, after several years of disappointing sales, Thornton replaced Ash with Fred O'Green as president of the company. With the new strategy, Litton sold some of its profit-losing subsidiaries and focused on

306-554: A simple analog computer to adjust the azimuth for the rocket in flight. Analog computer signals were used to drive 4 external rudders on the tail fins for flight control. Von Braun engineered the surrender of 500 of his top rocket scientists, along with plans and test vehicles, to the Americans. They arrived in Fort Bliss, Texas in 1945 and were subsequently moved to Huntsville, Alabama , in 1950 (aka Redstone arsenal ). Von Braun's passion

340-486: Is a human interface needed for the guidance system. As Astronauts are the customer for the system, many new teams are formed that touch GN&C as it is a primary interface to "fly" the vehicle. For the Apollo and STS (Shuttle system) CSDL "designed" the guidance, McDonnell Douglas wrote the requirements and IBM programmed the requirements. Much system complexity within manned systems is driven by "redundancy management" and

374-399: Is a virtual or physical device, or a group of devices implementing a controlling the movement of a ship , aircraft , missile , rocket , satellite , or any other moving object. Guidance is the process of calculating the changes in position, velocity, altitude , and/or rotation rates of a moving object required to follow a certain trajectory and/or altitude profile based on information about

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408-447: Is named PEG4 (Powered Explicit Guidance). It takes into account both the Q system and the predictor-corrector attributes of the original "Delta" System (PEG Guidance). Although many updates to the shuttles navigation system have taken place over the last 30 years (ex. GPS in the OI-22 build), the guidance core of today's Shuttle GN&C system has evolved little. Within a manned system, there

442-521: The IBM 650 , which was completed by early spring of 1958. MAC became the work-horse of the MIT lab. MAC is an extremely readable language having a three-line format, vector-matrix notations and mnemonic and indexed subscripts. Today's Space Shuttle (STS) language called HAL, (developed by Intermetrics, Inc.) is a direct offshoot of MAC. Since the principal architect of HAL was Jim Miller, who co-authored with Hal Laning

476-605: The vacuum tube producer 'Litton Industries Inc' from its founder Charles Litton Sr. for $ 1.5 million and subsequently adopted its name. Although Litton Industries lacked capital in the beginning, Thornton thought that the U.S. Department of Defense would need more sophisticated weapons and that the demand for another large electronics company would increase. During the years, Litton Industries acquired several other smaller companies and had merged with Monroe Calculating Machine . Monroe used Litton's technological assets and Litton required Monroe's sales and service outlets. During

510-620: The Army Ordnance effort was JPL's answer to the German V-2 missile, named MGM-5 Corporal , first launched in May 1947. On December 3, 1958, two months after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created by Congress, JPL was transferred from Army jurisdiction to that of this new civilian space agency. This shift was due to the creation of a military focused group derived from

544-518: The Chief Engineer, and Walter Schweidetzky, head of the guidance group. Walter had worked with Wernher von Braun at Peenemuende during World War II. The initial "Delta" guidance system assessed the difference in position from a reference trajectory. A velocity to be gained (VGO) calculation is made to correct the current trajectory with the objective of driving VGO to Zero. The mathematics of this approach were fundamentally valid, but dropped because of

578-531: The German V2 team. Hence, beginning in 1958, NASA JPL and the Caltech crew became focused primarily on unmanned flight and shifted away from military applications with a few exceptions. The community surrounding JPL drove tremendous innovation in telecommunication, interplanetary exploration and earth monitoring (among other areas). In the early 1950s, the US government wanted to insulate itself against over dependency on

612-774: The German team for military applications. Among the areas that were domestically "developed" was missile guidance. In the early 1950s the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (later to become the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory , Inc.) was chosen by the Air Force Western Development Division to provide a self-contained guidance system backup to Convair in San Diego for the new Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile . The technical monitor for

646-507: The MIT task was a young engineer named Jim Fletcher who later served as the NASA Administrator. The Atlas guidance system was to be a combination of an on-board autonomous system, and a ground-based tracking and command system. This was the beginning of a philosophic controversy, which, in some areas, remains unresolved. The self-contained system finally prevailed in ballistic missile applications for obvious reasons. In space exploration,

680-524: The Western Trident and Western Neptune passed to WesternGeco when the new company was formed. The company was often referred to as "Westerns" and was affectionately known over many years by many of its employees as the "circus without a tent". Dean Walling was the operating President of Western Geophysical for his entire working life and retired when the company was sold to Litton Industries in 1960. Litton Industries Litton Industries, Inc. ,

714-514: The advent of spacecraft , guided missiles , and commercial airliners . US guidance history centers around 2 distinct communities. One driven out of Caltech and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory , the other from the German scientists that developed the early V2 rocket guidance and MIT . The GN&C system for V2 provided many innovations and was the most sophisticated military weapon in 1942 using self-contained closed loop guidance. Early V2s leveraged 2 gyroscopes and lateral accelerometer with

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748-456: The challenges in accurate inertial navigation (e.g. IMU Accuracy) and analog computing power. The challenges faced by the "Delta" efforts were overcome by the "Q system" of guidance. The "Q" system's revolution was to bind the challenges of missile guidance (and associated equations of motion) in the matrix Q. The Q matrix represents the partial derivatives of the velocity with respect to the position vector. A key feature of this approach allowed for

782-566: The company suffered significant declines in the 1970s, selling off many of its unrelated brands and had largely returned to its defense roots by the 1980s. The company continued to shrink after the ending of the Cold War and by the late 1990s was a corporate takeover target. The company was purchased by Northrop Grumman in 2001. Litton Industries was originally established as an electronics company building navigation , communications and electronic warfare equipment. They diversified and became

816-601: The components of the vector cross product (v, xdv,/dt) to be used as the basic autopilot rate signals-a technique that became known as "cross-product steering." The Q-system was presented at the first Technical Symposium on Ballistic Missiles held at the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation in Los Angeles on June 21 and 22, 1956. The "Q System" was classified information through the 1960s. Derivations of this guidance are used for today's military missiles. The CSDL team remains

850-558: The electronic firms Itek Corp. and Core Laboratories. In the early 1990s, Litton Industries split into separate military and commercial companies. The US$ 2 billion commercial business, which included Litton's oilfield services, business, and automated assembly line operations, was named Western Atlas , Inc. In 1998, Litton Industries bought TASC, Inc. In 2000, TASC sold three stand-alone commercial operations: Adesso Software, WSI (Weather Services International) Corporation and Emerge. The company reported sales of $ 5.6 billion and

884-420: The late 1950s and early 1960s, 50% of Litton's business was with the U.S. Government; besides calculators, they were also producing inertial guidance systems for aircraft, potentiometers , duplexers , etc. In 1961, Litton acquired Ingalls Shipbuilding for $ 8 million and subsequently ventured into the production of submarines and oil-drilling equipment. By 1963, Litton Industries reached $ 500 million with

918-479: The navigation solution, is an input for the guidance system, among others like the environmental conditions (wind, water, temperature, etc.) and the vehicle's characteristics (i.e. mass, control system availability, control systems correlation to vector change, etc.). In general, the guidance system computes the instructions for the control system, which comprises the object's actuators (e.g., thrusters , reaction wheels , body flaps , etc.), which are able to manipulate

952-400: The object's state of motion. A guidance system is usually part of a Guidance, navigation and control system, whereas navigation refers to the systems necessary to calculate the current position and orientation based on sensor data like those from compasses , GPS receivers , Loran-C , star trackers , inertial measurement units , altimeters , etc. The output of the navigation system ,

986-797: The path and orientation of the object without direct or continuous human control. One of the earliest examples of a true guidance system is that used in the German V-1 during World War II . The navigation system consisted of a simple gyroscope , an airspeed sensor, and an altimeter. The guidance instructions were target altitude, target velocity, cruise time, and engine cut off time. A guidance system has three major sub-sections: Inputs, Processing, and Outputs. The input section includes sensors , course data, radio and satellite links , and other information sources. The processing section, composed of one or more CPUs , integrates this data and determines what actions, if any, are necessary to maintain or achieve

1020-477: The profitable ones. The company also succeeded to make a $ 1.6 billion deal with the Saudi Arabian Air Force . The profits of the company increased from $ 44 million in 1979 to $ 78 million in 1983. During the 1980s, Litton dropped its businesses in publishing, medical products, office furniture, and microwaves and shifted the production to sophisticated technology. As a result of that, the company bought

1054-437: The support of multiple "abort" scenarios that provide for crew safety. Manned US Lunar and Interplanetary guidance systems leverage many of the same guidance innovations (described above) developed in the 1950s. So while the core mathematical construct of guidance has remained fairly constant, the facilities surrounding GN&C continue to evolve to support new vehicles, new missions and new hardware. The center of excellence for

Western Geophysical - Misplaced Pages Continue

1088-524: Was acquired by Baker Hughes . In 2000, Western Geophysical became part of a joint venture between Baker Hughes and Schlumberger called WesternGeco and ceased to exist as a separate entity. In May 2006, Schlumberger bought Baker Hughes' 30% share of the company. Western Geophysical built a number of significant seismic survey vessels over the years, in different classes depending on the role. The majority of Western Geophysical vessels were named for geographic features, such as: More recent vessels including

1122-707: Was an American defense contractor that specialized in shipbuilding, aerospace, electronic components, and information technology. The company was founded in 1953 and was named after inventor Charles Litton Sr. , who was also an early investor in the company. During the 1960s, the company began acquiring many unrelated firms and became one of the largest conglomerates in the United States. At its peak, in addition to many defense-related companies, it also owned both Royal Typewriters and Adler , Moffat major appliances , Stouffer's frozen foods , and various office equipment and furniture companies. Like many conglomerates,

1156-724: Was interplanetary space flight. However his tremendous leadership skills and experience with the V-2 program made him invaluable to the US military. In 1955 the Redstone team was selected to put America's first satellite into orbit putting this group at the center of both military and commercial space. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory traces its history from the 1930s, when Caltech professor Theodore von Karman conducted pioneering work in rocket propulsion . Funded by Army Ordnance in 1942, JPL's early efforts would eventually involve technologies beyond those of aerodynamics and propellant chemistry. The result of

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