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Star trackers do exist and have been used on spacecraft for decades. But unfortunately, looking at the stars can only tell you your orientation in space, not yo
by teraflop 2y ago
Star trackers do exist and have been used on spacecraft for decades. But unfortunately, looking at the stars can only tell you your orientation in space, not your position. (At least, not to any remotely useful accuracy; you need to travel a huge distance to get a measurable parallax.)
Celestial navigation works on the Earth's surface (or the Moon's surface), because being able to determine the orientation of the local horizon (or zenith) is equivalent to determining your latitude and longitude. But that doesn't work for a spacecraft that doesn't have a horizon reference.
Of course, if you're orbiting the moon and you can accurately observe the directions to landmarks such as mountains and craters, you can fix your position relative to them. But that's not really what you'd call "celestial navigation".
- saltcured 2y agoI'm not trusting my spatial intuition, but shouldn't a theoretical star tracker for solar system use be able to spot the sun and planets and use them for more parallax info? I assume you would need orbital ephemeris info much like we need for GPS satellites. But, given measurements of angles to multiple planets, how well could you estimate your position? Would there a lot of error for your normal vector to the earth's ecliptic plane?