NAVIGATION REQUIREMENTS FOR ADVANCED DEEP SPACE MISSIONS

L. D. Friedman, R. L. Sohn and J. W. Moore

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	SIGHT REDUCTION procedures in marine navigation have been traditional for nearly a century and a half, just as the marine sextant, itself, has been essentially the same design for 250 years. The reduction of each sextant sight to true azimuth and altitude intercepts requires the use of standard forms, The Nautical Almanac, and several volumes of sight reduction tables. The procedure is tedious and time consuming, and errors in data selection and arithmetic are common. A low-cost, Specialized, small portable computer that operates with the sextant can be developed to relieve the navigator of his calculation tedium and blunders and improve his navigation accuracy. The design of such a small computer is feasible to day. The logic and a functional computer program have been developed hat combines the necessary data and spherical trigonometric equations to reduce the altitude measurements of the stars to data ready for plotting by the navigator. This paper will discuss the new digital readout day/night marine sextant which is part of the concept of the portable sextant-computer system, the development of the program for the computer, and its application to solve navigation problems. Furthermore, use of the portable computer will be shown to be applicable to all fields of navigation, although the current development centers around marine navigation.
Published in:	NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, Volume 19, Number 3
Pages:	266 - 280
Cite this article:	Friedman, L. D., Sohn, R. L., Moore, J. W., "NAVIGATION REQUIREMENTS FOR ADVANCED DEEP SPACE MISSIONS", NAVIGATION: Journal of The Institute of Navigation, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 1972, pp. 266-280.
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