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Nautical mile

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Nautical mile
Unit oflength
SymbolM, NM,[a] or nmi
Conversions
1 M, NM,[a] or nmi in ...... is equal to ...
   metre   1,852[1]
   foot   ≈6,076
   statute mile   ≈1.151
   cable   10

A nautical mile is a unit of length used in air, marine, and space navigation, and for the definition of territorial waters.[2][3] Historically, it was defined as the meridian arc length corresponding to one minute (1/60 of a degree) of latitude. Today the international nautical mile is defined as exactly 1,852 metres (6,076 ft; 1.151 mi). The derived unit of speed is the knot, one nautical mile per hour.

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Unit of length

Unit of length

A unit of length refers to any arbitrarily chosen and accepted reference standard for measurement of length. The most common units in modern use are the metric units, used in every country globally. In the United States the U.S. customary units are also in use. British Imperial units are still used for some purposes in the United Kingdom and some other countries. The metric system is sub-divided into SI and non-SI units.

Navigation

Navigation

Navigation is a field of study that focuses on the process of monitoring and controlling the movement of a craft or vehicle from one place to another. The field of navigation includes four general categories: land navigation, marine navigation, aeronautic navigation, and space navigation.

Territorial waters

Territorial waters

The term territorial waters is sometimes used informally to refer to any area of water over which a sovereign state has jurisdiction, including internal waters, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, and potentially the extended continental shelf. In a narrower sense, the term is used as a synonym for the territorial sea.

Meridian arc

Meridian arc

In geodesy and navigation, a meridian arc is the curve between two points on the Earth's surface having the same longitude. The term may refer either to a segment of the meridian, or to its length.

Latitude

Latitude

In geography, latitude is a coordinate that specifies the north–south position of a point on the surface of the Earth or another celestial body. Latitude is given as an angle that ranges from –90° at the south pole to 90° at the north pole, with 0° at the Equator. Lines of constant latitude, or parallels, run east–west as circles parallel to the equator. Latitude and longitude are used together as a coordinate pair to specify a location on the surface of the Earth.

Knot (unit)

Knot (unit)

The knot is a unit of speed equal to one nautical mile per hour, exactly 1.852 km/h. The ISO standard symbol for the knot is kn. The same symbol is preferred by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), while kt is also common, especially in aviation, where it is the form recommended by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The knot is a non-SI unit. The knot is used in meteorology, and in maritime and air navigation. A vessel travelling at 1 knot along a meridian travels approximately one minute of geographic latitude in one hour.

Unit symbol

Historical definition – 1 nautical mile
Historical definition – 1 nautical mile

There is no single internationally agreed symbol, with several symbols in use.[1]

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International Hydrographic Organization

International Hydrographic Organization

The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is an intergovernmental organisation representing hydrography. As of May 2022, the IHO comprised 98 Member States.

International Civil Aviation Organization

International Civil Aviation Organization

The International Civil Aviation Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates the principles and techniques of international air navigation, and fosters the planning and development of international air transport to ensure safe and orderly growth. ICAO headquarters are located in the Quartier International of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronics engineering, electrical engineering, and other related disciplines with its corporate office in New York City and its operations center in Piscataway, New Jersey. The mission of the IEEE is advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. The IEEE was formed from the amalgamation of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1963.

United States Government Publishing Office

United States Government Publishing Office

The United States Government Publishing Office is an agency of the legislative branch of the United States Federal government. The office produces and distributes information products and services for all three branches of the Federal Government, including U.S. passports for the Department of State as well as the official publications of the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Executive Office of the President, executive departments, and independent agencies.

Nanometre

Nanometre

The nanometre or nanometer is a unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), equal to one billionth of a metre and to 1000 picometres. One nanometre can be expressed in scientific notation as 1×10−9 m, and as 1/1000000000 metres.

History

Visual comparison of a kilometre, statute mile and nautical mile
Visual comparison of a kilometre, statute mile and nautical mile

The word mile is from the Latin word for a thousand paces: mille passus. Navigation at sea was done by eye[10] until around 1500 when navigational instruments were developed and cartographers began using a coordinate system with parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude.

By the late 16th century, Englishmen knew that the ratio of distances at sea to degrees was constant along any great circle (such as the equator, or any meridian), assuming that Earth was a sphere. Robert Hues wrote in 1594 that the distance along a great circle was 60 miles per degree, that is, one nautical mile per arcminute.[11] Edmund Gunter wrote in 1623 that the distance along a great circle was 20 leagues per degree.[11] Thus, Hues explicitly used nautical miles while Gunter did not.

Since the Earth is not a perfect sphere but is an oblate spheroid with slightly flattened poles, a minute of latitude is not constant, but about 1,861 metres at the poles and 1,843 metres at the Equator.[12] France and other metric countries state that in principle a nautical mile is an arcminute of a meridian at a latitude of 45°, but that is a modern justification for a more mundane calculation that was developed a century earlier. By the mid-19th century, France had defined a nautical mile via the original 1791 definition of the metre, one ten-millionth of a quarter meridian.[13][14] Thus 10,000,000 m/90 × 60 = 1,851.85 m ≈ 1,852 m became the metric length for a nautical mile. France made it legal for the French Navy in 1906, and many metric countries voted to sanction it for international use at the 1929 International Hydrographic Conference.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom used an average arcminute, specifically, a minute of arc of a great circle of a sphere having the same surface area as the Clarke 1866 ellipsoid.[15] The authalic (equal area) radius of the Clarke 1866 ellipsoid is 6,370,997.2 metres (20,902,222 ft).[16] The resulting arcminute is 1,853.2480 metres (6,080.210 ft). The United States chose five significant digits for its nautical mile, 6,080.2 feet, whereas the United Kingdom chose four significant digits for its Admiralty mile, 6,080 feet.

In 1929, the international nautical mile was defined by the First International Extraordinary Hydrographic Conference in Monaco as exactly 1,852 metres.[1] The United States did not adopt the international nautical mile until 1954.[17] Britain adopted it in 1970,[18] but legal references to the obsolete unit are now converted to 1,853 metres.[19]

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Latin

Latin

Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars supplanted it in common academic and political usage, and it eventually became a dead language in the modern linguistic definition.

Coordinate system

Coordinate system

In geometry, a coordinate system is a system that uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of the points or other geometric elements on a manifold such as Euclidean space. The order of the coordinates is significant, and they are sometimes identified by their position in an ordered tuple and sometimes by a letter, as in "the x-coordinate". The coordinates are taken to be real numbers in elementary mathematics, but may be complex numbers or elements of a more abstract system such as a commutative ring. The use of a coordinate system allows problems in geometry to be translated into problems about numbers and vice versa; this is the basis of analytic geometry.

Circle of latitude

Circle of latitude

A circle of latitude or line of latitude on Earth is an abstract east–west small circle connecting all locations around Earth at a given latitude coordinate line.

Latitude

Latitude

In geography, latitude is a coordinate that specifies the north–south position of a point on the surface of the Earth or another celestial body. Latitude is given as an angle that ranges from –90° at the south pole to 90° at the north pole, with 0° at the Equator. Lines of constant latitude, or parallels, run east–west as circles parallel to the equator. Latitude and longitude are used together as a coordinate pair to specify a location on the surface of the Earth.

Meridian (geography)

Meridian (geography)

In geography and geodesy, a meridian is the locus connecting points of equal longitude, which is the angle east or west of a given prime meridian. In other words, it is a line of longitude. The position of a point along the meridian is given by that longitude and its latitude, measured in angular degrees north or south of the Equator. On a Mercator projection or on a Gall-Peters projection, each meridian is perpendicular to all circles of latitude. A meridian is half of a great circle on Earth's surface. The length of a meridian on a modern ellipsoid model of Earth has been estimated as 20,003.93 km (12,429.87 mi).

Longitude

Longitude

Longitude is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east–west position of a point on the surface of the Earth, or another celestial body. It is an angular measurement, usually expressed in degrees and denoted by the Greek letter lambda (λ). Meridians are semicircular lines running from pole to pole that connect points with the same longitude. The prime meridian defines 0° longitude; by convention the International Reference Meridian for the Earth passes near the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England on the island of Great Britain. Positive longitudes are east of the prime meridian, and negative ones are west.

Great circle

Great circle

In mathematics, a great circle or orthodrome is the circular intersection of a sphere and a plane passing through the sphere's center point.

Equator

Equator

The equator is a circle of latitude that divides a spheroid, such as Earth, into the northern and southern hemispheres. On Earth, it is an imaginary line located at 0 degrees latitude, about 40,075 km (24,901 mi) in circumference, halfway between the North and South poles. The term can also be used for any other celestial body that is roughly spherical.

Edmund Gunter

Edmund Gunter

Edmund Gunter, was an English clergyman, mathematician, geometer and astronomer of Welsh descent. He is best remembered for his mathematical contributions which include the invention of the Gunter's chain, the Gunter's quadrant, and the Gunter's scale. In 1620, he invented the first successful analogue device which he developed to calculate logarithmic tangents.

League (unit)

League (unit)

A league is a unit of length. It was common in Europe and Latin America, but is no longer an official unit in any nation. Derived from an ancient Celtic unit and adopted by the Romans as the leuga, the league became a common unit of measurement throughout western Europe. It may have originally represented, roughly, the distance a person could walk in an hour. Since the Middle Ages, many values have been specified in several countries.

Earth ellipsoid

Earth ellipsoid

An Earth ellipsoid or Earth spheroid is a mathematical figure approximating the Earth's form, used as a reference frame for computations in geodesy, astronomy, and the geosciences. Various different ellipsoids have been used as approximations.

Foot (unit)

Foot (unit)

The foot (pl. feet), standard symbol: ft, is a unit of length in the British imperial and United States customary systems of measurement. The prime symbol, ′, is a customarily used alternative symbol. In both customary and imperial units, one foot comprises 12 inches, and one yard comprises three feet.

Similar definitions

The metre was originally defined as 110,000,000 of the length of the meridian arc from the North pole to the equator,[b] thus one kilometre of distance corresponds to one centigrad (also known as centesimal arc minute) of latitude. The Earth's circumference is therefore approximately 40,000 km. The equatorial circumference is slightly longer than the polar circumference – the measurement based on this (40,075.017 km/360 × 60 = 1,855.3 metres) is known as the geographical mile.

Using the definition 1/60 of a degree of latitude on Mars, a Martian nautical mile equals to 983 m (1,075 yd). This is potentially useful for celestial navigation on a human mission to the planet, both as a shorthand and a quick way to roughly determine the location.[21]

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Metre

Metre

The metre is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI).

Earth's circumference

Earth's circumference

Earth's circumference is the distance around Earth. Measured around the Equator, it is 40,075.017 km (24,901.461 mi). Measured around the poles, the circumference is 40,007.863 km (24,859.734 mi).

Geographical mile

Geographical mile

The geographical mile is an international unit of length determined by 1 minute of arc—1/60 degree—along the Earth's equator. For the international ellipsoid 1924 this equalled 1855.4 metres. The American Practical Navigator 2017 defines the geographical mile as 6087.08 feet (1855.342 m). Greater precision depends more on choice of ellipsoid than on more careful measurement: the length of the equator in the World Geodetic System WGS-84 is 40075016.6856 m, which makes the geographical mile 1855.3248 m, while the IERS Conventions (2010) takes the equator to be 40075014.1723 m, making the geographical mile 1855.3247 m, 0.1 millimetres shorter. In any ellipsoid, the length of a degree of longitude at the equator is thus exactly 60 geographical miles.

Mars

Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, larger only than Mercury. In the English language, Mars is named for the Roman god of war. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere and has a crust primarily composed of elements similar to Earth's crust, as well as a core made of iron and nickel. Mars has surface features such as impact craters, valleys, dunes, and polar ice caps. Mars has two small, irregularly shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Celestial navigation

Celestial navigation

Celestial navigation, also known as astronavigation, is the practice of position fixing using stars and other celestial bodies that enables a navigator to accurately determine their actual current physical position in space without having to rely solely on estimated positional calculations, commonly known as "dead reckoning", made in the absence of satellite navigation or other similar modern electronic or digital positioning means.

Human mission to Mars

Human mission to Mars

The idea of sending humans to Mars has been the subject of aerospace engineering and scientific studies since the late 1940s as part of the broader exploration of Mars. Some have also considered exploring the Martian moons of Phobos and Deimos. Long-term proposals have included sending settlers and terraforming the planet. Proposals for human missions to Mars came from e.g. NASA, Russia, Boeing, and SpaceX. As of 2023, only robotic landers and rovers have been on Mars. The farthest humans have been beyond Earth is the Moon.

Source: "Nautical mile", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, February 17th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile.

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See also
Notes
  1. ^ Alternative meanings of the abbreviation "nm" or "NM" are listed here.
  2. ^ No meridian was specified in either 1791, 1793, 1795 or 1799. For example, the Law of 18 Germinal an III (April 7, 1795) states: "Meter, the measure of length equal to the ten-millionth part of a terrestrial meridian contained between the north pole and the equator."[20]
References
  1. ^ a b c Göbel, E.; Mills, I.M.; Wallard, Andrew, eds. (2006). The International System of Units (SI) (PDF) (8th ed.). Paris: Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. p. 127. ISBN 92-822-2213-6. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-14. Retrieved 2017-06-20.
  2. ^ "mile | unit of measurement". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
  3. ^ "UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA". www.un.org. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
  4. ^ Symboles, Abréviations et Termes utilisés sur les cartes marines [Symbols, Abbreviations and Terms used on Charts] (PDF) (in French and English). Vol. 1D (INT1) (6th ed.). Service Hydrographique et Océanographique de la Marine (SHOM). 2016. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-08-21. Retrieved 2018-01-04. also available as Symbols and Abbreviations used on ADMIRALTY Paper Charts. Vol. NP5011 (6th ed.). United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. 2016. section B, line 45. ISBN 978-0-70-774-1741.
  5. ^ "WS SIGMET Quick Reference Guide" (PDF). ICAO. ICAO. Retrieved 2016-06-09.
  6. ^ International Standards and Recommended Practices, Annex 5 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, “Units of measurement to be Used in Air and Ground Operations”, ICAO, Fifth Edition, July 2010.
  7. ^ "APPENDIX A: SYMBOLS AND PREFIXES". IEEE. Retrieved 2016-06-09.
  8. ^ "U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual". U.S. Government Printing Office. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
  9. ^ Dutton's Navigation and Piloting (14th ed.). Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. 1985. ISBN 0-87021-157-9.
  10. ^ "Mile, Nautical and Statute – FREE Mile, Nautical and Statute information | Encyclopedia.com: Find Mile, Nautical and Statute research". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
  11. ^ a b Waters, David W. (1958). The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times. p. 374.
  12. ^ McNish, Larry. "RASC Calgary Centre - Latitude and Longitude". The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Retrieved 30 August 2019.
  13. ^ Bureau des Longitudes (1933). "Mesures employées sur les cartes marines". Annuaire Pour l'An 1933: 392. The nautical mile [mille marin] is in principle the length of the sexagesimal minute of a meridian at a latitude of 45°. ... If we assume that the metre is exactly the ten-millionth part of the terrestrial quarter meridian, it would be equal to 1,851.85 m. – Translation by Wikipedia.
  14. ^ Bureau des Longitudes (1848). "Mesures itinéraires". Annuaire Pour l'An 1848: 74.
  15. ^ Blazebrook, Richard (1922), A Dictionary of Physics, vol. 1, Macmillan and Co,Limited, p. 587
  16. ^ Snyder, John P. (1987). Map Projections: A Working Manual. p. 16.
  17. ^ Astin, A.V.; Karo, H. Arnold (June 25, 1959). "Refinement of values for the yard and the pound" (PDF). NOAA.gov. National Bureau of Standards. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 9, 2013. Retrieved 2018-07-07.
  18. ^ "Nautical mile definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary". Collins Dictionary. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  19. ^ "The Units of Measurement Regulations 1995". www.legislation.gov.uk. Retrieved 2016-06-10.
  20. ^ Hallock, William; Wade, Herbert T. (1906), Outlines of the Evolution of Weights and Measures and the Metric System, New York The Macmillan company, p. 54
  21. ^ Zubrin, Robert (1996). The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must. Richard Wagner. New York: Free Press. p. 162. ISBN 0-684-82757-3. OCLC 34906203.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)

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