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Posts Tagged “

Space Navigation

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space navigation

How to Find Your Way Home by the Light of a Pulsar

How do you navigate when you're floating out in deep space? By pulsar, that's how. In outer space (and even in Earth orbit) GPS doesn't do you a whole lot of good, so space scientists at the PLANS navigation conference in Monterey, CA this week have put together a couple of papers designed to show that a spacecraft could navigate autonomously by triangulating off the X-ray light emitted from pulsars scattered throughout the universe. The new system promises to be for space what GPS is for Earth; pretty useful when your stranded out past Saturn wondering "maybe that should have been a right at Titan..." More »

2:02 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Michael Reilly
1,858 views, 12 comments

Latest by Brock: @Daveinva: Good answer. This is some seriously forward thinking. It will be quite a while (to say the least) before we really need to do any extra-solar navigating. We need to see some serious advances in technology before we can more »