Like the title says. I’m trying to explain triangulation to my actual five year old, but don’t really understand it myself. Help!
In: Earth Science
If you draw one circle, there are an infinite number of points on them.
But if you draw two circles with different centers, there are only two points that are on both, like a Venn diagram.
And if you draw three circles with different centers, there will only one point that’s on all three.
(All of this is very handwavy to demonstrate the principle. Sometimes there will be zero, sometimes there will be infinite. That won’t happen if you’re triangulating something properly)
This is the idea behind triangulation. If you use a laser or radar or an echolocator, you can get a distance from you to something. Or in the case of a gps satellite, it tells you what time it was when it sent the signal you receive. Either way, the data you get from one signal is how far away the thing is from you, and you can represent that as a circle with a radius of that distance. You don’t know where it is but you know it’s somewhere on that circle. If you get a different signal from a different point, you now have a different circle, with a different center and a different radius. You know that the source of the signal must be on *both* circles because you measured it that way, and like we said earlier, that means there’s only two places where it could be! Taking one more measurement in the right place you can determine which of the two points it is.
Latest Answers