Milestone: NASA achieved GPS signals on Moon
Milestone: NASA achieved GPS signals on Moon
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Milestone: NASA achieved GPS signals on Moon
19 comments
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Ah shit, Google maps is driving us straight into the Andromeda Galaxy.
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Im always happy to see firefly on something. They are one of the companies I want to apply to post grad school. In an alt universe, this would’ve been Garmin
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Is that a Hyrulian glyph?
19 comments
They were only able to receive signals from the bare minimum to achieve a solution (4 GPS and 1 Galileo). Their achieved accuracy was +/- 1.5km and +/- 2m/s. That is good enough in astronomic scales to get you to a planet, but it isn't going to help failed landings or autonomous landings.
I don't think there was any new tech involved, just a receiver put on a moon lander to see if it could detect signals. And this won't really do anything for Mars for two reasons: 1) the signal strength would be too small for any reasonable antenna to detect GPS L1/L5 at Mars distances, and 2) the distance would make the geometry be unusable to trilaterate a solution... think about a triangle where two lengths are 100 million miles and the third length is 100 miles. That is a completely worthless geometry for trilateration of a position solution. Even if we could somehow detect a GPS signal at Mars, best case is we get atomic clock time.
Which is an improvement in of itself. That improves flying craft navigation to and from the moon into something significantly easier to automate and coordinate between multiple ships, more than ballistic dead reckoning.
If they can get rockets to mars, what’s to prevent them from deploying GPS satellites around Mars? Then just have the spacecraft switch to receiving those signals instead as it get close enough
So we can start setting up a GPS network around the moon to get super accurate timing for things like automated 3HE harvesters?