Global Positioning Systems, Inertial Navigation, and Integration

Chapter 9.2.3: INERTIAL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGIES: Early Strapdown Systems

9.2.3 Early Strapdown Systems

A gimbaled INS was carried on each of nine Apollo command modules from the earth to the moon and back between December 1968 and December 1972, but a strapdown INS was carried on each of the six6 Lunar Excursion Modules (LEMs) that shuttled two astronauts from lunar orbit to the lunar surface and back.

By the mid-1970s, strapdown systems could demonstrate "medium" accuracy (1 nmi/h CEP). A strapdown contender for the U.S. Air Force Standard Navigator contract in 1979 was the Autonetics7 N73 navigator, using electrostatic gyroscopes, electromagnetic accelerometers and a navigation computer with microprogrammed instructions and nonvolatile"magnetic wire" memory. In that same time period, the first INSs with ring laser gyros appeared in commercial aircraft.

A few years later, GPS appeared.

6Two additional LEMs were carried to the moon but did not land there. The Apollo 13 LEM did not make its intended lunar landing, but played a far more vital role in crew survival.
7Then a division of Rockwell International, now part of the Boeing Company.

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