Deap Space Navigation

(Henry Spencer) wrote:

In article ,
Derek Lyons wrote:
The dominant method is radio tracking... These measurements
are combined using a sophisticated estimating process...
Some other techniques sometimes get added...

Damm - it's amazing how close that description is to the methods we
used to track targets using sonar. (Though our targets were usually
assumed to be non-cooperative.)

Somewhat the same problem, of course, apart from whether the target is
trying to help.

Somewhat the same - even without target cooperation, NASA can either
look up, or knows many of the terms we have to derive or constrain.

There may well have been some cross-fertilization on methods -- probably
mostly from NASA to the USN, given the security issues for information
traveling the other way.

I suspect it went the other way, as only certain parts (mostly
regarding specific equipment performance and specific tactics) is
actually classified.

NASA threw money at these issues in the early 60s, around the time when
the USN was starting large-scale deployment of gear intended to counter
Soviet nuclear subs, including the beginnings of sophisticated sonar, so
the time scale was about right.

The basic equations we use date back to WWII and beyond - we can just
fill them in with more accurate data and solve them faster. The first
time I saw a WWII era TDC, I could operate it immediately - having
been trained on it's 60's era equivalent. (And the last of that
system didn't leave the fleet until the late 1990's.)

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL