Sunday, 14 January 2018

NASA tests X-ray-based "Space-GPS" navigation system

This illustration shows NICER at work from its perch on the outside of the International Space ...

With GPS it's harder than ever to get lost here on Earth, but deep space is a different story. Mind-boggling distances, three-dimensional travel and a lack of obvious landmarks all complicate spacecraft navigation. Pulsars have been proposed as a solution in the past, and now a NASA team has demonstrated the viability of the idea, with an experiment showing that a spacecraft can constantly and automatically calculate its position by tracking the perfectly-predictable X-ray signals from an array of pulsars.

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