It has been 20 years since the Permanent GPS Station, named SULP, was installed at the Astronomical Observatory of Lviv Polytechnic National University.
In addition to its main purpose, this station has the ability to perform online monitoring of the atmosphere to find parameters that affect the accuracy of solving problems of coordinate observation.
Today in Lviv, space observations are conducted in two ways – with the help of a GNSS station, as in Lviv Polytechnic, and a laser rangefinder, which is used by the Observatory of Ivan Franko University in Bryukhovychi. The information received at the Lviv Polytechnic Observatory is sent to all international and Ukrainian centers.
– The main task is to find out what irregularities occur with our Earth, – says Professor Stepan Savchuk, the Department of Higher Geodesy and Astronomy, the Institute of Geodesy, Lviv Polytechnic. If you thought that the Earth rotates around its axis in 24 hours – you are wrong. There is a difference in fractions of a second, but it is huge. This can affect mobile communication, GPS navigation. It is very important to determine this unevenness, – he emphasizes.
Other tasks involve the oscillations of the Earth’s poles. These fluctuations, according to Professor, occur for a number of irregular reasons.
Previously, Lviv astronomers often communicated with the military, made astronomical yearbooks for them. Astronomical indicators from these yearbooks were used by the military for orientation.
The data obtained from the station are used to solve the tasks of the land cadastre. Technologies make it possible to determine the area with an accuracy of 1–3 centimeters...