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Can one use Sun's magnetic field for navigation? I imagine Sun compass would be far more precise than Earth compass, no?
by Aspos 2y ago
Can one use Sun's magnetic field for navigation? I imagine Sun compass would be far more precise than Earth compass, no?
- contravariant 2y agoYou want something to make it easier to find the sun? Anyway the sun's magnetic fields is ridiculously weak on earth.
- dredmorbius 2y agoWell, one always has to consider the first manned expedition to the Sun and how they'll navigate. Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon. And star sightings might prove challenging, at least at optical frequencies. (Am now thinking of an SF story set on the Sun in which navigation and timekeeping play critical roles....)
- lukan 2y agoIn that SF story, I would be far more interested in the tech, that allows human life (or anything we bring) to withstand that slightly bigger problem called heat and radiation.
- dredmorbius 2y agoPshaw! Trifling details. (Focusing on the non-obvious problems might make for a more interesting and/or fantastical story.)
- lukan 2y agoAh, a energy force field it is then.
- WJW 2y agoOld reliable.
- dredmorbius 2y agoTurtles all the way down. Teenage, mutant, ninja, or otherwise.
- AbstractH24 2y agoHello darkness my old friend
- dredmorbius 2y agoWhich suggests the development of the Simon-Garfunkel Shield.
- wtetzner 2y agoAnd gravity.
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'm playing with slight variations of this prompt on GPTs: "Write a short (300--600 word) story about how human explorers on the Sun would address the challenges of navigation, orientation, and timekeeping (including the challenges of starfinding). Ignore obvious effects such as heat, gravity, and radiation." Results are ... not excellent literature, but amusing all the same.
- drbacon 2y ago> Telling time of day would be the first problem as it's always high noon. If the sun is always directly down from the surface, doesn't that make it solar midnight from anywhere on the surface?
- dredmorbius 2y agoA fair argument.
- deepsun 2y agoWhy, yes. It's really hard to find sun in fog, which is frequent at sea. And you really want it's location to be precise for navigation.
- gmiller123456 2y agoThe Vikings supposedly had a "sunstone" (cordierite crystal) that could help find the Sun through clouds or fog. I did buy a piece and wasn't able to get any good results, but my life didn't depend on it.
- vizzier 2y agoBy what mechanism was this intended to work? Any known fields would surely have stronger local effects outside of direct sunlight...
- addaon 2y agoIt’s a polarizing filter. The atmosphere polarizes sunlight based on the angle the light enters. You can find the position of the sun above the horizon as the point where light is least horizontally polarized (a horizontal filter has the least difference between brightness through the filter and around it), and potentially find the position of the sun itself by the highest rate of change of polarization angle. This works remarkably well even on overcast days — try it with polarized sunglasses.
- dekhn 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)#Possibility_of_use_for_orientation_and_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone_(medieval)#Possibilit...
- Aspos 2y agoI am thinking of a Sun compass a signal of which could be used in space. Can this signal be fused into IMU? I wonder if it makes any sense.