Saturday, November 6, 2010

In First Test Of Interstellar GPS, Team Uses Distant Pulsars To Determine Position In Space

Pulsar Positioning It beats rolling down the window and asking for directions. NASA

From Popular Science:

Global Positioning Systems work famously here on the home planet because we control all of the moving parts; put some satellites in the sky, equip a device with the proper hardware to communicate with them, and you can locate yourself just about anywhere. But how would we locate ourselves in deep space? For that kind of spatial location, a team of Italian researchers have devised a way to calculate one’s position in space using pulsars as interstellar navigation beacons.

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