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Essentially, a gyroscope is a top combined with a pair of gimbals. Tops were invented in many different civilizations, including classical Greece, Rome, and China. [5] Most of these were not utilized as instruments. The first known apparatus similar to a gyroscope (the "Whirling Speculum" or "Serson's Speculum") was invented by John Serson in ...
Torque-induced precession (gyroscopic precession) is the phenomenon in which the axis of a spinning object (e.g., a gyroscope) describes a cone in space when an external torque is applied to it. The phenomenon is commonly seen in a spinning toy top , but all rotating objects can undergo precession.
A gyroscope is an essential component of a gyrocompass, but they are different devices; a gyrocompass is built to use the effect of gyroscopic precession, which is a distinctive aspect of the general gyroscopic effect. [2] [3] Gyrocompasses, such as the fibre optic gyrocompass are widely used to provide a heading for navigation on ships. [4]
Axial parallelism (also called gyroscopic stiffness, inertia or rigidity, or "rigidity in space") is the characteristic of a rotating body in which the direction of the axis of rotation remains fixed as the object moves through space. In astronomy, this characteristic is found in astronomical bodies in orbit.
The outer casing of the gyrocompass device is held in such a way that it remains aligned with the local plumb line. When the gyroscope wheel inside the gyrocompass device is spun up, the way the gyroscope wheel is suspended causes the gyroscope wheel to gradually align its spinning axis with the Earth's axis.
The system rotates without requiring the application of any external force or couple, other than that required to support its weight. If a system is initially unbalanced, to avoid the stress upon the bearings caused by the centrifugal couple, counterbalancing weights must be added. This is seen when a bicycle wheel gets a buckled rim.
The trivial case of the angular momentum of a body in an orbit is given by = where is the mass of the orbiting object, is the orbit's frequency and is the orbit's radius.. The angular momentum of a uniform rigid sphere rotating around its axis, instead, is given by = where is the sphere's mass, is the frequency of rotation and is the sphere's radius.
Inertial navigation is a self-contained navigation technique in which measurements provided by accelerometers and gyroscopes are used to track the position and orientation of an object relative to a known starting point, orientation and velocity.