gyroscopes

Edit: Can anyone tell me about gyroscopes in the plane and why there weren't any or did they cease function?

Smartphones didn’t have nearly enough power to replicate video-editing software, but they did have built-in gyroscopes.

In addition, as the stations rotation changes, it's corrected using gyroscopes on the station.

Do the challenges compare at all to what we've seen in solid state gyroscopes / accelerometers getting massively cheaper?

Laptops, including Macbooks made since 2010 or so have gyroscopes in them.

Nah, I talked to the guys who develop Horizon, and the Android APIs and devices are very spotty about gyroscopes/accelerometers.

This is the method Opportunity uses to calibrate the gyroscopes/wheel encoders.

And of course laptops don't tend to have gyroscopes in them.

If GPS fails you have barometric sensors, you have accelerometers, you have compass, you have gyroscopes, you have infrared sensors for horizon.

Once these gyroscopes have stored their maximum momentum in the flywheels they need to be released, and thrusters are used at that point to cancel out the momentum.

I did not realize accelerometers/gyroscopes/whatever were capable of that.

Attitude determination – knowing which direction New Horizons is facing – is performed using star-tracking cameras, Inertial Measurement Units (containing sophisticated gyroscopes and accelerometers that measure rotation and horizontal/vertical motion), and digital solar sensors.

This is why I was asking about gyroscopes in the planes in enough locations to accurately tell a pilot "hey, I know your airspeed reads very low and the stall alarm is going off but you're not stalling.

I'd really like to see the general notion of "order of magnitude" be used for these kinds of achievements, which can be presented as a "number of digits" figure easily: - To measure the relativistic frame-dragging, Gravity Probe B had to measure the degrees of rotation of its gyroscopes with a precision of 11 digits after the decimal point whereas (military gyroscopes) only are accurate up to 7 digits.

Gyroscopes accumulate error with time, they make sense for an application with a short range but they're useless over long periods of time without a reference standard to crosscheck and recalibrate.