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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
>
>
> >
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> 11/24/2007 5:58 PM
>
>
>



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