Multimedia Gallery
- Media Type: Artifact
Cmdr. John Rodgers and his crew spent nine days adrift at sea in this aircraft after failing to rendezvous with a refueling ship.
Navigational dividers measure the distance between two points on a chart to mark the ship’s position.
The U.S. Navy’s Curtiss NC-4 flying boat made the first crossing of the Atlantic by air in 1919.
In the 1990s, the NIST-7 was the most accurate clock in the country and helped keep the GPS clocks synchronized.
Nocturnal and Sundial, signed by Caspar Vopel, Cologne, 16th century
The Astroinertial Navigation System provided rapid celestial navigation fixes for the SR-71.
A rubidium clock like this was tested on the NTS-2 satellite to see if clocks could keep accurate time in space.
Octant marked: "Andrew Newell / Maker / Boston," about 1800
Unflown duplicate of Pioneer 4, an early satellite designed for lunar exploration.
Lindbergh carried (but did not use) a drift meter like this on his flight to Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis.
