CASA Central and South America GPS Geodesy

In January 1988, scientists from over 25 organizations in 13 countries and territories cooperated in the largest Global Positioning System (GPS) campaign in the world to date (Table 1) [Neilan et al., 1988]. From January 18 to February 5, 1988, 43 GPS receivers collected about 590 station-days of data in American Samoa, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Sweden, United States, West Germany, and Venezuela. The experiment was entitled CASA UNO, an acronym for Central and South America—and “uno” is Spanish for “one,” designating first-epoch measurements. The CASA UNO experiment was the first civilian effort at implementing an extended GPS satellite-tracking network and established the first major GPS network in the northern Andean margin and the western Caribbean