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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: LADEE Moon Probe Puzzle
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2013 Sep 14, 18:27 -0700
From: Peter Monta
Date: 2013 Sep 14, 18:27 -0700
Nice result! Is it likely that this 1.7 nmi disparity is estimation error from the photos, or could it be actual deviation of the rocket from the published track? I'm not sure I'd entirely trust a table in a press kit; is high-precision tracking data made available for these NASA launches after the fact? It brings to mind Jim Lovell's joke that the NASA mission controllers should download his navigation state vector, generated autonomously on-board from sextant observations, rather than use the one computed on the ground (which was always used in practice). The ground controllers replied "touch�". Cheers, Peter
