NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Anyone know about this?
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2007 Nov 26, 17:24 -0500
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2007 Nov 26, 17:24 -0500
Hopefully, Paul Hirose will jump in here. To my understanding, they've had these gadgets for a while now. On Nov 24, 2007, at 8:47 PM, Guy Schwartz wrote: > I was bopping around the USNO web site and ran across this: > Celestial Navigation > A device that automatically observes stars, day or night, with > respect to the local gravity vector (i.e., the true "down" > direction), could provide a high-precision location and attitude > solution for ships and aircraft, independent of GPS. Two prototype > units with different designs have been constructed, one that > operates in the far-red optical part of the spectrum, the other in > the near-infrared. Accuracies better than 100 meters in position > and several arcseconds in attitude should eventually be achievable > with such devices. This project is jointly managed by the U.S. > Naval Observatory in Washington and the Navy's SPAWAR System Center > in San Diego. The prototype units were built by two California > contractors. A follow-up device is being built for surveying > applications (fixed points on land) by one of the contractors, > funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The > feasibility of using similar devices to precisely align Navy Aegis > ship radar is also being investigated. > > The navigation software for the project is based on some innovative > algorithms for celestial navigation developed at the Naval > Observatory about a decade ago. These algorithms are based on the > solution to a familiar astronomical problem - determining the orbit > of a body from a series of observations. In this case, the body in > question is a ship and its "orbit" is a rhumb-line track over the > spheroidal surface of the Earth. > > Anyone know anything about it or if it works: > > Guy > > > > > No virus found in this outgoing message. > Checked by AVG Free Edition. > Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.16.6/1150 - Release Date: > 11/24/2007 5:58 PM > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to NavList@fer3.com To , send email to NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---