* If you prefer, you can have Stephen Fry saying ‘Now, when possible, could you turn around. Ideally, don’t do it when impossible. Bless.’ Or a character called All-The-Way Annie say, ‘Take the ferry. Oooh, let’s rock the boat, baby!’ For a limited time you could also have bought a Top Gear Edition in which Jeremy Clarkson calls you a ‘driverist’ and observes, ‘after 700 yards, assuming this car can make it that far, you have reached your destination, with the aid of 32 satellites and me. Well done!’ but there were endorsement problems with BBC Worldwide and Clarkson is no longer available.

* Like Antarctica, GPS is effectively run by the United States. But there are several other global navigation networks at various stages of execution, including systems in Russia (Glonass) and Europe (Galileo). The Chinese government, ever fearful of external reliance and influence, launched its own satellites to construct its own guidance systems, supplying regional coverage. This is now expanding into a network called Compass, extending beyond Asia to acknowledge a wider world.

* In the United States, the world of electronic navigable maps is dominated by Navteq, based in Chicago, the supplier of maps to Garmin and other brands, as well as Bing Maps and MapQuest. Navteq is now a subsidiary of the Finnish company Nokia, but from the early 1990s until 2007 it was owned by Philips, which is also, of course, Dutch. Etak, one of the car sat nav pioneers, and apparently named after the Polynesian method of navigating by celestial guidance, was also originally an American company, beginning in California in 1983. But in 2000 it was acquired by Tele Atlas, which is Dutch. And lastly, one of the key elements of sat nav, the ability to find the shortest route, relies on an algorithm developed in the 1950s by a man called Edsger W Dijkstra, who was, inevitably, Dutch.

* This was in the 1830s; the earth’s prime meridian at the Greenwich Observatory was not internationally accepted for another half century.

* In a cool nod to the sort of human exploration that had inspired many NASA staff at school, two of the recent Mars microprobes were named Amundsen and Scott. As for permanent names on the surface, these have been standardised: large craters are named after deceased scientists, while small craters take the name of small villages of the world.