Related papers: Navigating with the Kamal
The design of navigation observers able to simultaneously estimate the position, linear velocity and orientation of a vehicle in a three-dimensional space is crucial in many robotics and aerospace applications. This problem was mainly dealt…
Harnessing the magnetic field of the Earth for navigation has shown promise as a viable alternative to other navigation systems. A magnetic navigation system collects its own magnetic field data using a magnetometer and uses magnetic…
The application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) techniques to classical radar altimetry offers the potential for greatly improved Earth surface mapping. This paper provides an overview of the progress of SAMOSA, Development of SAR…
Electricity in the atmosphere provides an ideal topic for educational outreach in environmental science. To support this objective, a simple instrument to measure real atmospheric electrical parameters has been developed and its performance…
Solar sails enable missions to observe the solar environment from unique vantage points, such as sustained observations away from the Sun-Earth line; sub-L1 station keeping; high inclination solar orbits; Earth polar-sitting and…
The High Inclination Solar Mission (HISM) is a concept for an out-of-the-ecliptic mission for observing the Sun and the heliosphere. The mission profile is largely based on the Solar Polar Imager concept: initially spiraling in to a 0.48 AU…
Originally an empirical law, nowadays Malus' law is seen as a key experiment to demonstrate the transverse nature of electromagnetic waves, as well as the intrinsic connection between optics and electromagnetism. In this work, a simple and…
NASA has been considering a solar sail that would accelerate a craft to a high velocity (~ 14 AU/yr) by the time it reached 5 AU. Then the sail would be dropped and the craft would coast alone to deep space. We propose that the sail be…
To measure oscillation of a simple pendulum was probably a first idea coming to mind after appearance of smartphones with small but powerful acceleration sensors~: Simply attach the telephone to a playground swing or hang it on two string…
Polarization measurements of the gamma-ray component of transient sources are of great scientific interest, they are however, also highly challenging. This is due to the typical low signal to noise and the potential for significant…
Many objects on the sky exhibit a centrosymmetric polarization pattern, particularly in cases involving single scattering around a central source. Utilizing a novel liquid crystal device (the ``theta cell'') that transforms the coordinate…
The traditional cultures of Aboriginal Australians include a significant astronomical component, perpetuated through oral tradition, ceremony, and art. This astronomical knowledge includes a deep understanding of the motion of objects in…
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, long-haul oceanic voyages of exploration and discovery routinely carried astronomical tent observatories to support land-based longitude determinations using heavy and cumbersome…
The students are introduced to navigation in general and the longitude problem in particular. A few videos provide insight into scientific and historical facts related to the issue. Then, the students learn in two steps how longitude can be…
We demonstrate how observations of pulsars can be used to help navigate a spacecraft travelling in the solar system. We make use of archival observations of millisecond pulsars from the Parkes radio telescope in order to demonstrate the…
We have built and tested a compact, low-cost, but very-high-performance astronomical polarimeter based on a continuously rotating half-wave plate and a high-speed imaging detector. The polarimeter is suitable for small telescopes up to ~1 m…
Time-domain astrophysics benefits from extreme-latitude sites, which can combine intrinsically extended nighttime with good sky conditions. One such location is the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL), at 80 degrees…
POLAR is a compact space-borne detector designed to perform reliable measurements of the polarization for transient sources like Gamma-Ray Bursts in the energy range 50-500keV. The instrument works based on the Compton Scattering principle…
Electricity in the atmosphere provides an ideal topic for educational outreach in environmental science. To support this objective, a simple instrument to measure real atmospheric electrical parameters has been developed and its performance…
POLAR is a new satellite-born detector aiming to measure the polarization of an unprecedented number of Gamma-Ray Bursts in the 50-500 keV energy range. The instrument, launched on-board the Tiangong-2 Chinese Space lab on the 15th of…