- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.world
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Is that a Hyrulian glyph?
interesting. its not just about the moon:
“LuGRE’s groundbreaking success opens the door for future NASA Artemis missions and other space explorations to use GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals. This means they can accurately figure out their position, speed, and time without human help. It’s a huge leap forward for navigation systems on the Moon and Mars!”
this should be pretty huge. think about the various failed landings and such you have seen in the news.:
“Traditionally, NASA engineers use a combination of onboard sensors and Earth-based tracking signals to track spacecraft. LuGRE’s demonstration shows that GNSS signals can autonomously aid navigation, even at the Moon’s distance.”
so this really changes space exploration as or more significant to the reusable rocket stages.
They were only able to receive signals from the bare minimum to achieve a solution (4 GPS and 1 Galileo). Their achieved accuracy was +/- 1.5km and +/- 2m/s. That is good enough in astronomic scales to get you to a planet, but it isn’t going to help failed landings or autonomous landings.
I don’t think there was any new tech involved, just a receiver put on a moon lander to see if it could detect signals. And this won’t really do anything for Mars for two reasons: 1) the signal strength would be too small for any reasonable antenna to detect GPS L1/L5 at Mars distances, and 2) the distance would make the geometry be unusable to trilaterate a solution… think about a triangle where two lengths are 100 million miles and the third length is 100 miles. That is a completely worthless geometry for trilateration of a position solution. Even if we could somehow detect a GPS signal at Mars, best case is we get atomic clock time.
If they can get rockets to mars, what’s to prevent them from deploying GPS satellites around Mars? Then just have the spacecraft switch to receiving those signals instead as it get close enough
I think the plan is to expand it. Put antennas like this at specific points like 6 around the sphere. Im sorta surprised that they don’t use a rover setup to maybe plant them as specific a location as they can. I think the theory is we can use what we have at earth and place beacons around such that you can get more and more exact measurments. Much like gps became more and more accurate. I would expect things put into lagrange points and such to. I mean they will have to do something to get this working out to like mars.
I work on GPS satellites and am on the team working to define the next generation of GPS satellites. The beacon idea you are talking about is a terrestrial augmentation system. We have that here on Earth already, and it’s critical infrastructure. On the moon, you could add nodes that receive GPS time and are used as a navigation aid on the moon. I doubt we would spend the money to put a GPS satellite at a Lagrange point anytime soon, since the benefits would be minimal for a single satellite. There is a lot more military interest in cis-lunar missions, though, so there might be benefits later. Repeater nodes on the moon’s surface might be worth it, if we start doing more missions there.
Lagrange points are also pretty far away (the closest one is 1 million miles away, while the moon is 238,000 miles away. Current GPS satellites barely have the power to send a usable signal to the moon. To get a usable signal from Lagrange distances, the power would have to be much much higher (power drops as a square of distance. There’s also the issue of building a satellite that lasts long enough in that radiation environment to make it worth it, since launching a satellite that big that far away is expensive. And that still would only help on the way to Mars, since Mars is another 99 million more miles past that (extremely rough numbers, since the average is 140 million miles from Earth but closest is 34 million miles and I have no idea what the distances would be to L4/L5 points).
Ah shit, Google maps is driving us straight into the Andromeda Galaxy.
I’d be okay with that, honestly.
Whoops, I’ve accidentally reached Próxima Centauri! Guess it’s time to die while doing some science.
I’d be okay with that, honestly
Well, good news then! If you wait a few billion years the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy.
Im always happy to see firefly on something. They are one of the companies I want to apply to post grad school. In an alt universe, this would’ve been Garmin
