QUESTION:
In the Kuiper, would you know where you are above Earth If you couldn't use
radar? If so, how?

ANSWER from Terry Rager on October 16:
The radar we have on the KAO is primarily for seeing weather (rainstorms).
There are two main ways we know where we are when we are flying: 1. over the
ground we have navigational radios, and 2. over water we have navigational
computers.

The radios on land send a signal up to a radio on the airplane and one of our
instruments will point toward the radio and tell us how far away it is.

The navigational computers are a bit more complicated. There are two different
types: INS and GPS. INS stands for Inertial Navigational System and once it is
running does not need any outside inputs. On the ground we tell it where it is
and through gyros and accelerometers it can take us any where in the world.
However, after a couple hours these computers "drift" and the accuracy can be
off as much as five miles.

GPS is the new Global Positioning Satellites. These are satellites which
actually tell us where we are by sending a signal to the airplane.

The best of both worlds is a Flight Management System which allows all these
different navigational systems to talk to each other by computer and give the
best positional information (as accurate as 3 ft.).

Thanks for the question!!

Terry