USE OF THE INFRARED RADIATION RANGE OF CELESTIAL BODIES FOR NAVIGATION OF SHIPS

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the need to develop and implement astronavigation systems on ships to improve the reliability of navigation of ships in the event of a global positioning system failure. This goal is achieved by analysing the vulnerability of global navigation satellite systems as the main means for determining the location of a ship in modern navigation; assessing the real state of navigational astronomy as a possible alternative to global navigation satellite systems when determining the location of a ship on the high seas; proving the possibility of using the infrared waveband in astronavigation systems on board a ship to improve the efficiency of navigational astronomy. The advantages of the infrared range over the optical range for determining the location of ships have been proved, which are expressed in independence from the brightness of the daytime sky background, significantly less dependence on hydrometeorological conditions, primarily on humidity, and higher atmospheric transparency in spectral windows during the transition from the visible to the near-infrared spectral region. It is shown that infrared stars of the late spectral classes K, M, N, C in the near-infrared region are the best for use in astronavigation systems due to the characteristics of their number, distribution over the entire celestial sphere, stationarity of the infrared image, and constancy of the stellar magnitude. The «windows of transparency» of the Earth's atmosphere in the near-infrared region of the spectrum are shown. The capacity of the optimal catalog of navigational luminaries for observation in the near-infrared spectral region is mathematically substantiated, and data on stellar magnitudes for the brightest navigational luminaries are given for the marked transparency ranges. The most significant result is the development of the structure of the astronavigation system of marine vessels for automated determination of the ship's position by tracking celestial natural landmarks (stars and planets), measuring astronavigation parameters and processing the measurement results by the system's computing device. The further direction of work is to provide proposals for the construction of the photodetector of the proposed system.