Redundancy in a geodetic network refers to what?

• A. The maximum number of observations allowed.
• B. The process of discarding inconsistent data.
• C. The extra independent observations beyond the minimum needed to solve for unknowns, allowing error checking and weight estimation.
• D. The property of having no errors.

Answer: (C)

Redundancy means you have extra independent observations beyond the minimum needed to determine the unknowns. This creates more equations than unknowns, giving you degrees of freedom to check consistency and to estimate how reliable each observation is (weights or variances). In a least-squares adjustment, these extra measurements let you compute residuals, identify outliers or blunders, and adjust the influence of each observation accordingly. The result is a more robust and reliable set of computed coordinates because errors can be detected and mitigated rather than assumed away. The other ideas miss the point: redundancy isn’t about pushing a maximum, nor about discarding data, and it doesn’t imply that there are no errors.