Lec 16 MIT 16.885J Aircraft Systems Engineering, Fall 2005
Good morning. I am filling in for Professor Hoffman who is off addressing the French Parliament at this moment, or maybe it was yesterday afternoon. Tough choices of whether to stay here or go there. Well, that's right, Noah. These days the issue of knowing where you are, navigation is really taken for granted. We have GPS in our cell phones. GPS in handheld devices. GPS tells the taxi driver whether or not he should be turning up that one way street. When we began with human space travel, particularly as we entered the Apollo era, the question of navigation, along with guidance and control, was still a major issue. In fact, it was rather uncertain whether or not, in the Apollo mission, we were going to be able to, with assurance, do all of the navigation required for going to lunar trajectory and then doing the precise navigation to land on the moon. The history of leading guidance navigation and control has now, for a period of over half a century, been located ju...