In a southern primitive forest, members of a field survey team of the No.1 Mapping Group of the Headquarters of the General Staff hit the "Enter" key on a laptop computer which started to do a huge amount of calculations and finished in a few moments the calculation and test work that had to be done in two days in the past.

　　As a pioneer mapping group, it has finished surveying tasks for the tests of China's first atomic and hydrogen bombs and satellite. The Central Military Commission has awarded the unit the title of "A Heroic Mapping Group". Its troops are used to hard life in field surveys, which is described as "surveyors rods and a half bag of food are the only stuff they have, earth will be their bed and sky will serve as their quilt", and are proud of being capable of enduring those difficulties.

　　To build a modernized information platform for military operation and command, the survey troops are required to cover the whole nation to gathter information and data about geographical situations and establish a highly accurate GPS (global positioning system) control system.

　　The overrun volume of work and the GPS receivers, unknown to them, as well as the complete new ways of survey have made these surveyors, who had never bowed to difficulties, feel completely at a loss.

　　They set up a trouble-shooting group, made innovations on the instruments and equipment, improved survey method, and worked against the clock. In two years, they developed independently an astronomic time-meter of the first generation, riding from the time of handwork into the stage of computers. Later, the time-meter was promoted in the PLA and greatly sped up the surveying speed.

　　Meanwhile, a battle of challenging the limit of life has also started to unfold in the sector of GPS network layout surveying mission. From the Nansha Islands to the northwest deserts and from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau stretching to the east coast, dozens of surveying teams from the mapping group spreading all over the country started to make surveys at places including forbidden islands, storm-haunted deserts, and rough seas where no life is possible. Their hard work has been crystallized into marks on the electronic map, thus contributing to the formation of China's digital first-and-second-level GPS network.

　　There is no forbidden land under the feet of the soldiers. After repeated tests, the surveying group has created the "space intersection and meridian line marking" surveying method, and all of their work has reached a satisfying 100% outstanding level. They also worked with research institutes to develop an up-to-date means for optimizing precision project control network, data processing and quality control, whose calculation speed is more than 20 times that of similar software. With the application of these methods, they spent just one month to finish the work that would take three years in the past. Their plan for reforming a base's infrastructure network has laid down a solid foundation for survey and control tasks of manned space programs.

　　By Tang Yuping, Yuan Liyun

　　(Mar.17, PLA Daily)