Navigating Space by the Stars

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A tool that has helped guide sailors across oceans for centuries is now being tested aboard the International Space Station as a potential emergency navigation tool for guiding future spacecraft across the cosmos. The Sextant Navigation investigation tests use of a hand-held sextant aboard the space station.

Sextants have a telescope-like optical sight to take precise angle measurements between pairs of stars from land or sea, enabling navigation without computer assistance. NASA’s Gemini missions conducted the first sextant sightings from a spacecraft, and designers built a sextant into Apollo vehicles as a navigation backup in the event the crew lost communications from their spacecraft. Jim Lovell demonstrated on Apollo 8 that sextant navigation could return a space vehicle home. Astronauts conducted additional sextant experiments on Skylab.

Read more about the Sextant experiment happening aboard the space station: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/Sextant_ISS

HD Download: https://archive.org/details/jsc2018m000418_Navigating_Space_by_the_Stars

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Wikimedia Commons, in Wikimedia Commons

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Public domain, as the Wikimedia Commons states it.

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Public domain

Credit

NASA Johnson

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