Just as lighthouses have helped sailors navigate safely into harbor for centuries, future space travellers may receive similar guidance from the steady signals created by pulsars.
Scientists and engineers are using the International Space Station to develop pulsar-based navigation using these cosmic lighthouses to assist with wayfinding on trips to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis programme and on future human missions to Mars, the US space agency said on Wednesday.
Pulsars, or rapidly spinning neutron stars, are the extremely dense remains of stars that exploded as supernovas.
They emit X-ray photons in bright, narrow beams that sweep the sky like a lighthouse as the stars spin.
From a great distance they appear to pulse, hence the name pulsars.
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