NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Brad Morris
Date: 2014 Feb 22, 20:17 -0500
Hi Lu
You are absolutely right. The original question was how to navigate on an extra-solar planet.
I think our first exemplar should be the Mars rovers. They clearly don't use celestial or a GPS variant. They navigate firstly by mark one eyeballs (binocular cameras if I'm not mistaken) and secondly by counting wheel revolutions and accounting for wheel slip. So call it reckoning by track made good. That's how vehicles navigate when not on the earth. They look around, plan their course and check how they are doing visually.
In fact, for millennia, humans navigated across terra firma by eyeball, reference to landmarks (waypoints) and maps. It was only the featureless environment of the oceans that required celestial. Without oceans, no celestial would be required. Make it easier? Yes! Required? No!
Brad
You're absolutely right, Brad. As I recollect, though, the original question had to do how one might navigate once had landed on an extra-solar planet.
From: Brad Morris <bradley.r.morris---.com>
To: luabel{at}ymail.com
Sent: Saturday, February 22, 2014 12:02 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Navigation on other planets
It would seem that inter-stellar travel would indeed take some form of celestial navigation. The stars can be considered to be points within 3 space. As you move among them, the perspective of them will change while the positions of the stars do not. Your position in interstellar space is a function of finding the position that matches the perspective!It seems on the face of it to be a reasonable transformBradOn Feb 22, 2014 2:47 PM, "Marcel Tschudin" <marcel.e.tschudin---.com> wrote:
True, but the question was about navigating on planets outside our solar system.
In this conversation also Jupiter and Saturn were mentioned ... I assumed that one ment those in this solar system.
