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Navigating Space by the Stars
A tool that has helped guide sailors across oceans for centuries is now being tested aboard the International Space Station as a potential emergency navigation tool for guiding future spacecraft across the cosmos. The Sextant Navigation investigation tests use of a handheld sextant aboard the space station. Sextants have a telescopelike optical sight to take precise angle measurements between pairs of stars from land or sea, enabling navigation without computer assistance. NASAs Gemini missions conducted the first sextant sightings from a spacecraft, and designers built a sextant into Apollo vehicles as a navigation backup in the event the crew lost communications from their spacecraft. Jim Lovell demonstrated on Apollo 8 that sextant navigation could return a space vehicle home. Astronauts conducted additional sextant experiments on Skylab. Read more about the Sextant experiment happening aboard the space station:
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