NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Brad Morris
Date: 2012 Oct 30, 12:55 -0700
Jam Proof? There will soon be receivers available to the military, with civilian sets to follow
Paul,
This will no doubt be a very interesting talk. Worthy of a video for posting to YouTube.
If cesium clocks in satellites and space craft can be replaced by x-ray pulsar timing devices then there would be a significant weight savings.
Greg Rudzinski
[NavList] gives whole new meaning to CelNav...
From: Paul Saffo
Date: 29 Oct 2012 22:08
For any of you who happen to be out in the bay area this week...Talks at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, Palo Alto
4:15PM
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, Palo Alto
3251 Hanover St.
Palo Alto, CANov. 1 – Dr. Brian Jones, LM/ATC: Navigating by the Stars: X-ray Pulsar Timing for Navigation
GPS works by using known, stable timing references (the GPS constellation) to compute relative line-of-sight distances, and then triangulating one’s position. Nature has provided an analogous set of stable clocks that can be used for navigation throughout the Solar System and beyond. X-ray pulsars emit stable bursts of x-rays with extremely high regularity. We’ll show how work at the Advanced Technology center has resulted in the repurposing of astronomical x-ray telescope detectors for the purpose of constructing a jam-proof autonomous navigation system. We will see the theory of X-ray pulsar timing and navigation, the detector performance, and investigate some of the challenges inherit in the project.
Dr. Jones studied physics as an undergrad at Princeton, where his research work focused on infrared measurements of the galactic brown dwarf population using data from the COBE satellite. At Stanford, his graduate work involved searching for gamma-ray pulsars and gamma-ray bursts in data from EGRET, the high-energy detector on board the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. In addition, he shared a number of graveyard shifts at SLAC with Dave Chenette, testing a GLAST (now known as Fermi) prototype tower. Dr. Jones has been at Lockheed Martin for over 10 years, working in various areas, including Special Programs, Space Science projects, the Space Environmental Effects Group, and geoCARB.
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