Related papers: Autonomous Spacecraft Navigation With Pulsars
Pulsars are potentially the most remarkable physical laboratories we will ever use. Although in many senses they are extremely clean systems there are a large number of instabilities and variabilities seen in the emission and rotation of…
Highly magnetised rapidly spinning neutron stars are widely considered to be natural sites for acceleration of charged particles. Powerful acceleration mechanism due to unipolar induction is thought to operate in the magnetospheres of…
Pulsar timing uses the highly stable pulsar spin period to investigate many astrophysical topics. In particular, pulsar timing arrays make use of a set of extremely well-timed pulsars and their time correlations as a challenging detector of…
Autonomous navigation is one of the main enabling technologies for future space missions. While conventional spacecraft are navigated through ground stations, their employment for deep-space CubeSats yields costs comparable to those of the…
Pulsars are wonderful gravitational probes. Their tiny size and stellar mass give their rotation periods a stablility comparable to that of atomic frequency standards. This is especially true of the rapidly rotating "millisecond pulsars"…
High-precision pulsar timing is central to a wide range of astrophysics and fundamental physics applications. When timing an ensemble of millisecond pulsars in different sky positions, known as a pulsar timing array (PTA), one can search…
We propose AstroSLAM, a standalone vision-based solution for autonomous online navigation around an unknown target small celestial body. AstroSLAM is predicated on the formulation of the SLAM problem as an incrementally growing factor…
Radio pulsars are fascinating and extremely useful objects. Despite our on-going difficulties in understanding the details of their emission physics, they can be used as precise cosmic clocks in a wide-range of experiments -- in particular…
In this invited talk, I first discuss the advantages and disadvantages of many probes for the magnetic fields of the Milky Way. I conclude that pulsars are the best probes for the magnetic structure in our Galaxy, because magnetic field…
A relativistic deep space positioning system has been proposed using four or more pulsars with stable repetition rates. (Each pulsar emits pulses at a fixed repetition period in its rest frame.) The positioning system uses the fact that an…
We provide a complete study of the factors influencing gravitational-wave signal localization using pulsar timing arrays. We derive analytical expressions for the Cram\'er-Rao sky localization precision that delineate the impact of the…
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a U.S. space-based radionavigation system that provides reliable positioning, navigation, and timing services to civilian users on a continuous worldwide basis -- freely available to all. GPS provides…
For reliable operation, next generation autonomous agents will need enhanced situational perception as well as precise navigation capabilities. The global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals that are utilized by practically all…
This book chapter explores key aspects of neutron stars, pulsar glitches, tidal deformability, fast pulsars, the equation of state, and strange quark matter stars. Challenges in directly measuring neutron star radius have led to reliance on…
General relativity offers a classical description to gravitation and spacetime, and is a cornerstone for modern physics. It has passed a number of empirical tests with flying colours, mostly in the weak-gravity regimes, but nowadays also in…
In pulsar astronomy, detecting effective pulsar signals among numerous pulsar candidates is an important research topic. Starting from space X-ray pulsar signals, the two-dimensional autocorrelation profile map (2D-APM) feature modelling…
A new era of space exploration and exploitation is fast approaching. A multitude of spacecraft will flow in the future decades under the propulsive momentum of the new space economy. Yet, the flourishing proliferation of deep-space assets…
We propose a new neutrino propulsion mechanism for neutron stars which can lead to strong velocity kicks, needed to explain the observed bimodal velocity distribution of pulsars. The spatial asymmetry in the neutrino emission is naturally…
Pulsar timing is a process of iteratively fitting pulse arrival times to constrain the spindown, astrometric, and possibly binary parameters of a pulsar, by enforcing integer numbers of pulsar rotations between the arrival times. Phase…
Orbit determination of spacecraft in orbit has been mostly dependent on either GNSS satellite signals or ground station telemetry. Both methods present their limitations, however: GNSS signals can only be used effectively in earth orbit,…