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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.
I'm so sorry your investment in Buggy Whip futures has turned you sour on the future.
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...
See Neutron pulse rate
> 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.
Actually, that does not help. The Solar System is a large place and the Earth is 150 million kilometres from the sun and very hard to see even from Jupiter or Mars. Your original point is still correct though but for a different reason: our propulsion technology is so limited that for the foreseeable future interplanetary flights will involve precise launch windows and months of coasting without thrust. This means that it is hard to get lost since gravity is determining where you go and, if you did somehow manage to get lost then there is almost no chance that you could ever get back...so all this tech will do is tell you precisely where you will be when you die which, scarily, may be months away if you have enough life support.
What about all those particles produced at cern. Are they not man made objects?
The GPS said this wormhole was a shortcut!