Slight aside, I remember reading a poster here on HN who said they created an astronav system for use with webcams and published the code on github, only to receive on knock on their door a little while later from somebody who explained that this code in fact violated ITAR restrictions and they needed to remove it.
Would that hold up in court if the person were willing to challenge it? That seems a clear cut violation of that person's speech, but I guess anything for "national security".
Yes, US secrecy laws will hold up in court. Just ask any contractor who accidentally brought home a classified document or three (and their name isn't Trump).
So… while that’s true of most astronav systems to date (particularly the ones meant to be used during daytime, and especially with reference stars potentially near the horizon), I’m not sure that’s really a hard requirement.
If you restrict the domain to nighttime or exoatmospheric, a high-resolution wide-angle camera paired with an offline astrometry database has the makings of a strapdown astronav.
Widening the domain again, the natural motion of the vehicle is probably enough, when combined with inertial sensors to aid pixel-shift image stabilization, to achieve the same kind of processing gain as the older systems got with shutter-synchronous detection.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 32.6 ms ] threadYou think that's unfair? Just wait until you hear about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret
If you restrict the domain to nighttime or exoatmospheric, a high-resolution wide-angle camera paired with an offline astrometry database has the makings of a strapdown astronav.
Widening the domain again, the natural motion of the vehicle is probably enough, when combined with inertial sensors to aid pixel-shift image stabilization, to achieve the same kind of processing gain as the older systems got with shutter-synchronous detection.