# Navigating Space by the Stars

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

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2018
- Runtime: 1 min
- By: NASA Johnson
- Genres: Space
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Navigating_Space_by_the_Stars.webm)
- Licence or status: Public domain (as the archive states it)
- Credit: NASA Johnson
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/142988988?play=1)