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Mystery of Aer Lingus Flight 712 British Missile Strike & Commercial Cover-up in 1968?
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Missile Navigation Systems The development of rockets and guided missiles has accelerated the introduction of new and sophisticated electromechanical systems of navigation, including automatic celestial systems, Doppler navigation, and inertial navigation. The automatic celestial system, known also as the star-tracking system, consists of an electronic device capable of computing a celestial solution and feeding it to a unit designed to track a celestial body or bodies automatically. The tracking unit feeds back the information to computers that then record the actual position of the vehicle. Doppler navigation, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist and mathematician Christian Johann Doppler, is concerned primarily with air navigation and involves the analysis of the shift in radio frequency resulting from reflection of radar waves by an approaching or receding object. See Doppler Effect.Inertial navigation, which is based on inertial guidance, is a self-contained system, wholly independent of either visual or electronic information from outside the craft in which it is operating. This system consists of a certain type of accelerometer, stabilized by gyroscopes that register the magnitude of the acceleration of the craft in both a north-south and an east-west direction from a known starting point; the accelerations are converted by computers into a precise position for the craft. Originally developed for use in long-range ballistic missiles and nuclear-powered submarines, inertial systems now find much wider applications, such as guiding long-range transport aircraft. |