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For centuries, sailors have traversed the seas with the help of a sextant and the stars.

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Now a team led by scientists and engineers at NASA Goddard is taking navigation by the stars to a whole new level.

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Future spacecraft will have the capability to explore the vastness of space

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with unprecedented awareness of their own place in the Galaxy.

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NASA's SEXTANT mission will demonstrate the use of pulsars, nature's stellar lighthouses, as navigational beacons.

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Pulsars are small, dense stellar remnants that regularly sweep beams of energy our way.

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Successive sweeps produce pulses timed so precisely that they rival atomic clocks on Earth

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and that's exactly how NASA plans to use them.

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With its sensitive telescopes, SEXTANT will lock onto multiple pulsars, allowing it to determine its precise location in the Galaxy.

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Future spacecraft will navigate to distant planets using this new capability

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in much the same way that we use GPS to travel to unfamiliar locations on Earth.

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Pulsar-based spacecraft navigation is still in its development stage,

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but the SEXTANT proof of concept mission could be tested on the International Space Station as soon as 2015.

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