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The Spacecraft Navigator
Scientists from the Scientific and Industrial Research Organization of Australia proposed a method that allows spaceships to determine their location in the vast Universe – a kind of the GPS-navigator.
Surprisingly, this issue remains relevant for the contemporary astronautics. While flying to the moon 40 years ago, U.S. astronauts, like sailors, guided by the stars – for that, the sextants were installed on the board of the “Apollo”. Today, for the ships navigation, plying in the low Earth orbit, it is often used mentioned GPS system. With this purpose, the telescope signals also can be used, located on the Earth. Both of these methods, however, are of a little use when it comes to flying a ship in the deep space. Australian scientists have proposed an alternative method of the celestial navigation. Away from the Earth the ship can be guided by the known pulsars – rotating neutron stars that regularly emit X-ray or radio signals, as one of the development authors in the journal Advances in Space Research, George Hobbes, has written. These signals can be taken by a small telescope mounted on the ship board.
The procedure itself is similar to the classic navigation at sea – namely, the method of the cross bearing, with the help of which the ships captains determine their location on the sea space. To do that, they draw an angle on the map. One straight line at a visible object (such as a rock ), the other – on the north (i.e. the direction to the North Pole). The intersection of the lines gives the coordinates of the ship location. “If one take a bearing on the three pulsars, located one -to-one at an angle of 90 degrees, it is possible to calculate the spacecraft position in the three-dimensional space of the Universe” – explains Hobbes.
According to the Australian