Since the beginning of navigation, sailors have relied on the sky to determine their direction, using visual markers like the North Star and the celestial poles to locate their position. Today we face less of this problem, since we have the Global Positioning System (GPS) that we use daily in our cars and smartphones. However, this technology relies on humans to make changes every day, and the farther you go from satellites, the harder it is to pinpoint your location. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Although GPS is accurate enough to allow us to navigate Earth, it is not accurate enough to take a spacecraft to Saturn. Based on recent research from Science News and WIRED, a new solution has been introduced: a stellar GPS network, or pulsar positioning system. The principle of the pulsar positioning system is that, in the same way that GPS uses the coherence of satellite signals to determine your area, spacecraft would be able to receive radio signals from dead stars that emit radiation at constant intervals , also called pulsars. Instead of having to rely on distant radio telescopic communications from Earth, spacecraft could venture further without having to worry about inaccurate coordinate readings. Using the GPS system, the receiver, such as a car or phone, receives radio signals from satellites in Earth's orbit. . These satellites are tuned with atomic clocks to transmit signals at the same time. These satellites are all located at different distances from the receiver and therefore each transmission reaches the device at different times. From these differences in duration, the GPS system deduces its location. The highest quality consumer devices can estimate your location to within about a meter in the best situations, but tall buildings and interference can easily disable the system by 20 meters or more. Because these GPS satellites rotate very quickly around the Earth (they complete two orbits per day). ), Einstein's theory of special relativity requires that clocks run slower than those on Earth. For example, after two minutes, GPS satellites already deviate from Earth's clocks. The only way to send accurate time to satellites is to determine the actual time from clocks on Earth and relay the information to each satellite, which is a perpetual requirement for the Department of Defense. Conversely, even though a pulsar's uniform signals are used to keep time, much like the GPS system, the mathematics of the pulsar positioning system already takes relativity into account. Thus, the constant revision associated with GPS is avoided. Pulsars have a very advanced ability to keep time similar to atomic clocks and do not change very often between intervals compared to Earth. Even when they do, the distance they travel can be predicted. To prove that the pulsar's positioning system could navigate on its own, several researchers experimented with their radio signals. Angelo Tartaglia, a physicist at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy, led a study on software that mimicked pulsar emissions. Tartaglia and his team tracked the observatory's trajectory with a precision of several nanoseconds. Additionally, researchers from the Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) experiment have reported.