INTERPLANETARY NAVIGATION: AN EXTENSION OF AN ANCIENT ART

E. V. Stearns and W. E. Frye

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	BEFORE EXAMINING SOME of the navigational problems associated with interplanetary travel, it will be useful to discuss some of the geography- perhaps heliography would be a better term-of the solar system. Some data describing the planets and their orbits is given in Table 1. From this data it may be seen that within the scale of the solar system, we on earth reside on one of the so-called inner planets and are in quite intimate communication with our nearest neighbors and with the sun. Another interesting fact, illustrated in Fig. 1, is that if we were to map the solar system in three dimensions and omit the extreme planets, Mercury and Pluto, the remaining planets would be confined very nearly to an ecliptic plane-the plane of the earth’s orbit about the sun.
Published in:	NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, Volume 6, Number 8
Pages:	526 - 535
Cite this article:	Stearns, E. V., Frye, W. E., "INTERPLANETARY NAVIGATION: AN EXTENSION OF AN ANCIENT ART", NAVIGATION: Journal of The Institute of Navigation, Vol. 6, No. 8, 1959, pp. 526-535.
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