NavList:

Andres,

I'll direct this to you since Paul reads only a small portion of NavList posts. Can you explain what he was doing in this example? I don't mean the math. What I couldn't understand is the navigational scenario here. What sort of practical circumstance does this example describe? Or if not literally practical, what is the "thought experiment" here?

You wrote:
"A generalization could be used if n observations are obtained, using the method of least squares."

This is an area which seems to have some room for improvement in traditional navigation methodology (without breaking the meaning of the word "traditional"). How do we combine navigational data from different sources with varying levels of quality, e.g. dead reckoning, visual bearing, and celestial LOPs, in a consistent way? How do we put an "error ellipse" around a position when it's derived from disparate sources? Kalman filtering? Or is there something easier? Perhaps some graphical solution that it all boils down to under the conditions of traditional navigation methods...

-FER

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