Milestone: NASA achieved GPS signals on Moon
The first technology demonstration to acquire and track Earth-based navigation signals on the Moon’s surface.
Is that a Hyrulian glyph?
interesting. its not just about the moon:
"LuGRE’s groundbreaking success opens the door for future NASA Artemis missions and other space explorations to use GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals. This means they can accurately figure out their position, speed, and time without human help. It’s a huge leap forward for navigation systems on the Moon and Mars!"
this should be pretty huge. think about the various failed landings and such you have seen in the news.:
"Traditionally, NASA engineers use a combination of onboard sensors and Earth-based tracking signals to track spacecraft. LuGRE’s demonstration shows that GNSS signals can autonomously aid navigation, even at the Moon’s distance."
so this really changes space exploration as or more significant to the reusable rocket stages.
So we can start setting up a GPS network around the moon to get super accurate timing for things like automated 3HE harvesters?
someone with far more experience replied to me and he might be better to ask. Im sorta viewing this as like the equivalent of sputnik for what it is and like how long it took to get civilian gps in the 90's. So like 30 or 40 years. stuff by and large goes faster now so im thinking this may be something utilized by actual space industries if they can get going in the next ten or twenty years. I mean ten is unlikely but never know. Total peanut gallery opinion from me though. I don't work in the industry im just a science and technology geek.
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.
I think the plan is to expand it. Put antennas like this at specific points like 6 around the sphere. Im sorta surprised that they don't use a rover setup to maybe plant them as specific a location as they can. I think the theory is we can use what we have at earth and place beacons around such that you can get more and more exact measurments. Much like gps became more and more accurate. I would expect things put into lagrange points and such to. I mean they will have to do something to get this working out to like mars.
Ah shit, Google maps is driving us straight into the Andromeda Galaxy.
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
