ANDREW LOVE, JR.
Good morning. My name is Andrew Love. This is my tenth science presentation at Balticon; today I'm going to explain what inertial navigation is, how it works, and how it might work in the future. One of the things I like best about inertial navigation is how the design of an inertial navigation system is strongly constrained by physics and basic facts about Earth – simply by knowing that an inertial navigation system will be operating on Earth tells you a lot about what kind of errors will occur in the system, even if you know nothing else about the technology and design choices of the engineers who built it - and this means we can anticipate the characteristics of an inertial system on some other planet (or a more exotic environment) too.