SPACE: How Will We Find Our Way Home?
Space is big — really big. And if you want to successfully navigate the interstellar depths of our Milky Way galaxy, you’re going to need some sort of reliable system. A new proposal tries to keep the method as simple as possible: use pairs of stars to provide a galactic reference frame. Within our solar system, interplanetary spacecraft rely on Earth-based systems for navigation. When we send a radio signal to a spacecraft and it replies, we can use the time delay of the reply to calculate a distance. We can also monitor the spacecraft in the sky, and by … Read more