
NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Cel nav in space
From: Bill B
Date: 2005 Jan 4, 19:31 -0500
From: Bill B
Date: 2005 Jan 4, 19:31 -0500
> Do you know the story of the manually-oriented rocket burn on the flight of > Apollo 13? It was depicted in the movie. That spacecraft had a "sextant" which > was intended to be used in emergency circumstances. This sextant was really > intended for orienting the spacecraft, not so much for fixing position. In a > real emergency, it proved to be useless because the vehicle was surrounded by > a field of artificial stars --little bits of debris from the explosion-- which > made it impossible to pick out the real stars. Fortunately, in training > someone had thought of using the Earth for orientation, so that's what they > did. I faintly recalled that, but only am aware of the movie version and even then memory is foggy. Do you know/recall what and how the sextant was to be used and what positional information could be extracted? Thanks Bill