Slashdot Mirror
NASA's Got a Plan For a 'Galactic Positioning System' To Save Astronauts Lost in Space (space.com)
From a report: Outer space glows with a bright fog of X-ray light, coming from everywhere at once. But peer carefully into that fog, and faint, regular blips become visible. These are millisecond pulsars, city-sized neutron stars rotating incredibly quickly, and firing X-rays into the universe with more regularity than even the most precise atomic clocks. And NASA wants to use them to navigate probes and crewed ships through deep space. A telescope mounted on the International Space Station (ISS), the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), has been used to develop a brand new technology with near-term, practical applications: a galactic positioning system, NASA scientist Zaven Arzoumanian told physicists Sunday (April 15) at the April meeting of the American Physical Society.
With this technology, "You could thread a needle to get into orbit around the moon of a disant planet instead of doing a flyby," Arzoumian told Live Science. A galactic positioning system could also provide "a fallback, so that if a crewed mission loses contact with the Earth, they'd still have navigation systems on board that are autonomous." Right now, the kind of maneuvers that navigators would need to put a probe in orbit around distant moons are borderline impossible.
With this technology, "You could thread a needle to get into orbit around the moon of a disant planet instead of doing a flyby," Arzoumian told Live Science. A galactic positioning system could also provide "a fallback, so that if a crewed mission loses contact with the Earth, they'd still have navigation systems on board that are autonomous." Right now, the kind of maneuvers that navigators would need to put a probe in orbit around distant moons are borderline impossible.
Talk about ignoring the last half century of history.
We have probes at the farthest edges of the solar system.
We have needed this longer than I have been alive.
the plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft launched in 1972 and 1973 showed the Earth's position from 14 pulsars
GPS works by triangulating between 4-6 satellites that are all spread out. A 3d hexagon with a person in the middle somewhere.
With extra-terrestrial navigation, the person is very far outside of that hexagon. It's really hard to find an exact position when you have multiple sources that - for all intents and purposes - are co-located. Get far enough from Earth and all GPS satellites are one dot in the distance. Looks like they've found a way to use various stars as the points of that hexagon. Cool.
But if you're lost in space, you should be more worried about air, water, food, temperature, and shelter.
Just having a screen telling me I'm two million light years from Andromeda, while interesting, is as useless as an eBook about a topic no one cares about.
...than to get off at the wrong exit of Intergalactic Highway 39.
Oh fuck off. NASA has an excellent track record of developing and releasing technologies that have advanced space exploration for everyone. This technology would be useful to every country and company that launches anything out of earth orbit regardless of whether or not NASA ever sends another astronaut to space.
Sorry, couldn't resist and get off my lawn.
Don't be too hard on him - he's paid to post anti-US stuff.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Are people insane? Have you forgotten about the speed of light and basic physics? You aren't going to be visiting "distant moons" with crewed missions. That includes Mars.
Only Russia and China have the ability to put people into space.
"Talk about ignoring the last half century of history."
Like the part where we don't even have the Concorde anymore, no one's been to the Moon in almost as long, and all we do is send trained monkeys into Low Earth Orbit?
"We have probes at the farthest edges of the solar system."
How many are manned? Could you design a system that would keep a person alive for 40 years with no external inputs and no resupplies?
"We have needed this longer than I have been alive."
No, you have dreamed about sci-fi that will never happen. Get a real goal.
I'm so sorry your investment in Buggy Whip futures has turned you sour on the future.
I think what the GP means is that no _astronaut_ has been so far from earth as to need this tech. It may well save a probe, but it won't save an astronaut... because if they're far enough away to need this, then knowing where you are isn't much help.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Not really that new. The SR-71 had an "Astro-inertial navigation system" that could track stars day and night to locate the aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#Astro-inertial_navigation_system
In addition, the use of pulsars to accurately determine Earthly position had been considered since at least the 1980s [citation required]. (I worked for a major US inertial navigation test system outfit in the 80s and the use of pulsars was discussed to solve a particularly nasty set of specs required by one customer.)
America may have terminally lost its way but what about the Chinese ?
There is nobody that is even alive today, nor probably for the next several centuries, that is going to need something like this.
And George Boole was just a madman.
... when watching Star Trek, if currently NASA had in a mind a method that could be used much like a GPS.
This could very well be useful in our lifetimes if they were to build a ship powered by Ion, plasma, etc. drives that could point and go instead of relying on being thrown across space like a rock.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
GPS has what, ~3/4 meters precision? That's on Earth.
This would eventually have 1 km precision in _all_ of space. Ya that's a big circle on my futuristic, hologram smartphone Goopple Maps (c), but in _all_ of space?! Damn...
I don't disagree, but they should really be focused on recycling technologies. We still have to send water up to crack into oxygen while throwing the shit overboard and continuously taking in new resources. We need mechanisms to recycle (not filter) things like Ammonia and shit for space habitation a Hell of a lot more than we need a tech to navigate which would be dependent upon a tech for propulsion we aren't anywhere near having yet (that's not to say this isn't useful research, but they should really be focused on advanced propulsion development and waste reclamation - the former just to be able to get anywhere [dread reckoning with an engine is better than GPS without so much as having legs] and the latter to be able to actually survive without constant resupply from Earth and the associated logistic chain.)
See Neutron pulse rate
So after our own solar system is utterly destroyed, the few survivors will still have some idea where they are! Unfortunately, faster than light travel still isn't even a remote possibility.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I disagree, George Boole was false.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Actually, I suspect we do, right now. We would just have to skip some testing and take chances.
'safely put people in space' is a better goal.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We have probes at the farthest edges of the solar system.
Indeed we do but crucially those probes do not contain astronauts nor can they do much more than float through the void so even if they got lost there is nothing they can do about it. With our current technology manned spacecraft have large teams of people on Earth monitoring them and very limited propulsion so getting lost is extremely hard and, if it happens, there is probably nothing to be done anyway. Indeed, given that the furthest anyone has ever gone so far is the moon you can find out where Earth is by just using your eyes.
> No, you have dreamed about sci-fi that will never happen. Get a real goal.
We use the stars to navigate the land, the seas, and the sky.
We built a constellation of artificial stars that speak our gadgets use to locate themselves.
And now we're talking about using natural (as far as we know) pulsing stars as a constellation of stars that speaks to our gadgets, using them to locate themselves.
What I'm talking about is in no way science fiction. It's the plainly visible, natural advancement of technology.
This idea was used in Enterprise to signal the Borg. The episode was Regeneration, in the second season, involving the crashed Borg sphere from First Contact. The frequencies of three pulsars were used as position references to provide the location of Earth. The signal was sent by Borg drones in the 22nd century and would arrive in the delta quadrant in the 24th century. The approach for positioning sounds a lot like what's being done here.
We watched star trek and saw them do it.
all we do is send trained monkeys into Low Earth Orbit?
you can thank Nixon for that. he killed the moon program and started development of the shuttle program which couldn't get beyond low earth orbit.
Like the part where we don't even have the Concorde anymore, no one's been to the Moon in almost as long, and all we do is send trained monkeys into Low Earth Orbit?
Or maybe like the part where NASA has the launch of a Mars probe scheduled for about 3 weeks from now on May 5th?
Oh, wait, that really fucks up your argument, doesn't it?
So... they made a different version of GPS and named it... GPS? Global... Galactic... they might want a name that starts with a different letter.
Talk about ignoring the last half century of history. We have probes at the farthest edges of the solar system. We have needed this longer than I have been alive.
I can see how this might come in handy if we ever decide to travel to Mars or something, but given our manned spaceships' traveling capabilities up until now all a lost astronaut had to do was look around till he saw a big blue planet and then head straight for it.
The Apollo missions included a periscope and modified sextant to allow the astronauts to navigate based on sightings from various stars. It was critically important to ensure the craft was where they thought it was.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Great! Atomic Clocks are already Stratum 0 in NTP. Does this make these new things Stratum -1?
Yes, in a story about a galactic positioning system for ASTRONAUTS, launching an unmanned probe to Mars really fucks me up.
Clinical sub-idiot.
I disagree, George Boole was false.
That's true!
"Talk about ignoring the last half century of history."
Like the part where we don't even have the Concorde anymore, no one's been to the Moon in almost as long, and all we do is send trained monkeys into Low Earth Orbit?
"We have probes at the farthest edges of the solar system."
How many are manned? Could you design a system that would keep a person alive for 40 years with no external inputs and no resupplies?
"We have needed this longer than I have been alive."
No, you have dreamed about sci-fi that will never happen. Get a real goal.
Yes this is where your brand of trolling goes the way of the dodo... you dodo.
This is needed if we are going to have men on mars and men on the moon and that is not a pipe dream according to the people who are controlling the purse strings at this point in history. Of course you are not on the same page but that is not surprising as you seem to make this mistake a lot on /. when you post drivel like you do.
Right now, the kind of maneuvers that navigators would need to put a probe in orbit around distant moons are borderline impossible.
Human space history is full of deemed impossible things that were accomplished.
The real challenge nowadays is to accomplish anything within modern space industry Quality Assurance standards.
The GPS said this wormhole was a shortcut!
Didn't the Ancients already figure this out using a set of six astrological symbols representing any point in space, with the seventh symbol representing the point of origin? Plus, Captain Samantha Carter figured out how to account for stellar drift.
The Blackbird spyplane had a navigation system based on celestial navigation. It had a database of the brightest stars and could calculate the coordinates of the aircraft both during night-time and day-time. Special filters masked out atmospheric light and allowed starlight to be detected.
And I think we still don't have it.
Unless you land a probe *on* the distant moon first, that starts broadcasting the moon's position relative to the rest of the galaxy, a galactic positioning system still is not going to help the hypothetical probe find its way into orbit.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Intra-sub-system orbit != space
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
If a probe is heading for a distant planet, it's moving pretty fast, because we don't want to wait several lifetimes to get the information back. If it's moving pretty fast, its nowhere near orbital speed for a moon (Triton?), and its trajectory is going to be limited so it won't be able to play fancy games with gravity slingshots. That's the big problem with getting into orbit. Not precision of trajectory.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes