NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: celestial navigation on Gemini and Apollo flights
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2008 Sep 16, 13:42 -0700
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2008 Sep 16, 13:42 -0700
Marcel Tschudin wrote: > I'm questioning where his apparent > horizon really was when looking at the disappearance of a star through > so much airmass. Could it be that the whole exercise wasn't really one > for finding the position but rather an experiment for measuring the > refraction at high zenith angles? I don't think so. The purpose of the Module VI experiment was to demonstrate navigation and rendezvous without help from Mission Control: "I remember Dick Carley, Module VI's strongest supporter, taking me aside one day shortly after I had been assigned to the Gemini 10 crew and extolling the virtues of on-board navigation. Dick started with the Arabs, tracing the progress of civilization in terms of the distance and accuracy of man's travels. 'Out of sight of land finally,' he whispered in sepulchral awe at the audacity of the early great navigators. Dick would make me a modern-day Magellan. Dick would delete both EVAs and make Gemini 10 a navigation orgy, repeating orbit determination and prediction exercises over and over until they had been perfected. Of course he was talking to the wrong guy." But I agree, it is odd that Collins said the stars were "snuffed out by the atmosphere" as he looked through the sextant. I wonder if he confused that with the photometer experiment, in which he measured the change in magnitude of setting stars as they went down into the atmosphere. -- I block messages that contain attachments or HTML. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Navigation List archive: www.fer3.com/arc To post, email NavList@fer3.com To , email NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---