Artist's Impression of a Pulsar
You're undoubtedly already
used to receiving great GPS reporting in many of the places you visit. Now get prepared
for GPS in cosmos. NASA is working to construct a navigation system that would
work anywhere in our solar system and outside.
Spacecraft now depend generally
on radio signals sent from Earth to navigate, as Spectrum describes. As craft
get more away from Earth, though, that technique becomes less precise. So NASA
is considering to use signals from neutron stars, super compressed, super
high-energy stars at the end of their days, to trace ships in bottomless space.
Certain neutron stars, called
pulsars, produce great beams of light while spinning rapidly. NASA relates
pulsar light to lighthouse beams. Their movement is tremendously steady, so a
spacecraft sensing those beams will know precisely where each beam is projected
to be in space at any given time, and thus compute where it is in space, too.
Pulsar beams are measurable in "every conceivable" point in cosmos
where people might want to sail in the future, Ken Gendreau, the chief
scientist in the project, said in a report.
Gendreau and his team plan to
test the arrangement in a machine they'll send to the International Space
Station in 2017. The operation is called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and
Navigation Technology (NICER/SEXTANT).
NICER/SEXTANT's devices will
also clarify astronomers more about neutron stars. Massive stars turn into
neutron stars when they finish the nuclear reaction that energies them, detonate,
and then collapse. Neutron stars produce powerful magnetic and electric fields
and pack matter in the highly compressed manner imaginable. There's no way to reconstruct
their situations on Earth in order to study them.
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