Related papers: Autonomous Spacecraft Navigation With Pulsars
The large constellations of spacecraft planned for use in cislunar space (on the Lunar surface, in Lunar orbit, and in the vicinity of the Lunar Gateway) require new solutions for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT). Here, I describe…
The exploration of interstellar space will require autonomous navigation systems that do not rely on tracking from the Earth. Here I develop a method to determine the 3D position and 3D velocity of a spacecraft in deep space using a star…
A local positional system (LPS) is proposed, in which particles are launched at given velocities, and a sensor system measures the trajectory of particles in the platform frame. These measurements allow us to restore the position and…
Starting from the description of space-time as a curved four-dimensional manifold, null Gaussian coordinates systems as appropriate for relativistic positioning will be discussed. Different approaches and strategies will be reviewed,…
In-spiraling supermassive black holes should emit gravitational waves, which would produce characteristic distortions in the time of arrival residuals from millisecond pulsars. Multiple national and regional consortia have constructed…
Shemar et al. (2016) presented results based on the output of a feasibility study for the European Space Agency (ESA) on the use of X-ray pulsars for deep space navigation, a concept often referred to as 'XNAV'. Here we describe some of the…
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars that are renowned for their timing precision, although glitches can interrupt the regular timing behavior when these stars are young. Glitches are thought to be caused by interactions between normal and…
The phenomenal rotational stability of millisecond pulsars allows them to be used as precise celestial clocks. An array of these pulsars can be exploited to search for correlated perturbations in their pulse times of arrival due to…
The disciplines of asteroseismology and extrasolar planet science overlap methodically in the branch of high-precision photometric time series observations. Light curves are, amongst others, useful to measure intrinsic stellar variability…
Pulsars are famed for their rotational clock-like stability and their highly-repeatable pulse shapes. However, it has long been known that there are unexplained deviations (often termed "timing noise") from the rate at which we predict…
Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are short-period pulsars that are distinguished from "normal" pulsars, not only by their short period, but also by their very small spin-down rates and high probability of being in a binary system. These…
A gravitational wave passing through a pulsar will lead to a variation in the moment of inertia of the pulsar affecting its rotation. This will affect the extremely accurately measured spin rate of the pulsar as well as its pulse profile…
The main reasons for searching for pulsars are to: (i) get an accurate census of the neutron star population and its origin and evolution; (ii) connect neutron stars to other stellar populations in the Galaxy and globular clusters; (iii)…
The use of four Lagrange points of the Sun/Earth system for fundamental physics experiments in space is presented. L1, L2, L4 and L5 rotating rigidly together with the Earth form a natural reference frame at the scale of the inner solar…
Pulsars, especially millisecond pulsars, are intrinsically very stable celestial clocks, and their great pulse period stability open up a wide range of potential applications to astronomical phenomena, such as a natural detector for very…
Pulsars are fantastic objects, which show the extreme states of matters and plasma physics not understood yet. Pulsars can be used as probes for the detection of interstellar medium and even the gravitational waves. Here I review the basic…
The determination of the absolute and relative position of a spacecraft is critical for its operation, observations, data analysis, scientific studies, as well as deep space exploration in general. A spacecraft that can determine its own…
It is believed that cores of neutron stars provide a natural laboratory where exotic high baryon density QCD phases may exist.The theoretically well established {\it neutron superfluid phase} is also believed to be found only inside neutron…
Neutron stars emitting continuous gravitational waves may be regarded as gravitational pulsars, in the sense that it could be possible to track the evolution of their rotational period with long-baseline observations of next-generation…
Most periodicity search algorithms used in pulsar astronomy today are highly efficient and take advantage of multiple CPUs or GPUs. The bottlenecks are usually represented by the operations that require an informed choice from an expert…