Mapping courses

Are space travels nothing else than travels extended in comparison to travels on earth? Or are they something different?

Travels on earth are always travels on a plane surface - the location of all ways, cities, countreis, mountains etc. are described by only two coordinates. Is that valid for space travels too? To travel for an orbit or the moon a third coordinate seems to be required.

And when travels on the moon's surface are intended - are they to be considered as a part of the space travel?

Additionaly the moon as a target as well as space stations in orbits other than the geostationary orbit are moving.

Last but not least the orbits of the planets are distributed within a certain range of degrees - they aren't orbiting in the same plane.

There never will be the usual maps we are using for travels on the earth. Mapping as used seems to be impossible.



Does all this mean difficult obstacles to travel individually in space? What are the consequences for today impossible interstellar travels?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

A good point... so, obviously, we will need lady spaceship pilots because us men would never stop to ask directions.


--Ralph

Hehe. Being stubborn would probably not be a good idea if you get lost in space;)

Hmmm thinking about digital maps that are set to change as the planets move? Something like the navigation systems in today's cars but with the 3D information of space? Or possibly one like the map that Star Wars uses when Obi Wan loses his planet? (3D hologram type thing)

barring holograms, you'd have to use some sort of 3d environment, kind of like a strategy game interface, for navigation. you'd have surrounding space and the solar system scanned in in 3d, and you could have your ship scanned in too, then you could plot a course and get a graphical prediction of where your ship would be at x time in comparison to all the other ships, the planets, asteroids, etc. then you could have more vital statistics like fuel, hull integrity, etc. and it'd show you what they'd probably be like when you got there too, so you could plan stuff on the fly. obviously it'd be alot more complex than that, but i guess that's a good general outline of something you could use. after all, if you can get a fairly exact location of where you are at a given time and where all the planets are, you should be able to figure out where you are at any time from the position of the planets and how long you've been since you checked all the locations, and you could predict once you have a vector to follow obviously.

Flying space is nothing like travelling on a plane, at least in the near future.

Everything is orbital transfers, because everything orbits something. If you know where you want to go then you need your destinations orbital details, then you need to figure out how to change your orbit to match or intercept your destination.

Your origin and destination are not static in relation to each other, and if you pause (magic pausing beam) along the way, the trip changes entirely.

Once you are on the surface of the moon however you simply use the local 2d co-ordinate system.

A few CSPs here, but not for myself. Something like Space.com's Starry Night Pro Plus software (every possible object should be included, for the most accurate stellar readings) would be absolutely outstanding for this, especially if combined with the physics abilities of Laminar Research's X Plane or Space Combat. Astrogation software is pretty complex, since, as idiom said, it's all orbits. Thus, it'd also be wise to include aspects of programs similar to Benjamin Blonder'sCavendish.

great info ... the programs look good for this kind of problem. my parents wont be happy that i'm adding something else to my brithday wishlist (starry night)... thanks for the links though

Starry Night OWNZ ALL. But it needs a scope to go with it.

Also transorbital travel is somewhat more serious than say, a car trip, thus you would be expected to put in a lot more preperation.

What about the soft- and hardware used by Deep Space One?

What about creating something remebering to maps valid for special well known constellations as an assistnace?

NASA is thinking about engines providing much higher velocities for manned interplanetary travels. This will require more corrections of the course than the Apollo flights did require and it will require manual course corrections by the astronauts using the computers too.



Dipl.-Volksiwrt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

You mean the manually checked starmap? Used by the guy with the interplanetary version of the sextant? Yeah, that's one of the standard backup schemes -- don't know if NASA implemented it for the Apollo program, but I think they did something similar.

I didn't have in mind something special - I only remember that it was provided increased autonomy by advanced navigation systems including observing the stars and comparing them to a catalog, a database, something like a map or anything else.

It was an experimental spacecraft and has proven to reduce the communication requirements the Deep Space Network is used for normally. Obviously it has been working very well and so these soft- and hardwares seems to provide significant advances - further development might result in solutions fit to the purposes in question.

But what soft- and hardware has it been and what capacity and abilities did it provide?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

...

Could the constellation of GPS satellites help. Admittedly we'd be outside of their coverage, but you could still get positional information from them. Another set up around the moon would pin down your location even more accurately.

As for the display, I saw a demonstration of a hologram looking device, but it was comprised of a large single twist of material that was spun very fast inside a glass cylinder. The twist of material, in spinning, went through ever point inside the cylinder, and a set of lasers, timed correctly traced 3D objects. This one was showing a wire frame two player biplane game, where two planes were flying around within the cylinder, chasing and shooting at each other. Now that was with lasers, if you replaced the lasers with a bunch of video projectors, hook them up to a couple of fast computers, and you could almost have a solid looking 3D display. However, I suspect that it'd be difficult to see with high ambient light. Mmm!

It doesn't fit completely into this thread but it is linked to it and might be o meaning for it or having any impact on it perhaps.

An articl under www.wissenschaft.de is reporting that Robert Gaskell of the Planetary Science Institute has developed an innovation that can generate precise altitude/height-profiels of planets based solely on images taken by probes. The profile of Itokawa got that new way is much more precise than GPS for Earth the articel says - the precision of the innovation is 40 cm.

The new method is called Stereo-Photoklinometry and combines informations from images that show a portion of a surface under different angles of the perspective and under different directions of the sunlight.

Gaskell got a precise shape of the jovian moon Io and includes the Moon, the saturnian moon Enceladus, the asteroid Eros and Mercury. Regarding Mercura there is a lack of different angles and different directions of sunlight.

The method unveiled an error of the results of the laser-based measurements of Eros of 14 meters.



Might this mthod be modified so that even orbits, distances of planets etc. might be measured more precisely?

Might it be applied by vehicles during approach to a planet to temporarily get a better map of the course(s) to fly along?



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

In between the article "New Maps Detail Solar System Objects" ( www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080902-s ... t-map.html ) is reporting abozt it as well.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)