Imagine if your GPS on your phone took 40 minutes to calculate your position?
You might miss your turn, or be several exits down the highway before you GPS caught up with you.
How do we navigate through space ?
currently, spacecraft flying beyond earth don’t have a GPS to find their way through space.
Navigators on earth send a signal to the spacecraft which receives it and sends it back.
Extremely precise clocks on the ground, called atomic clocks measure how long it takes the signal to make this two-way journey.
The amount of time tells them how far the spacecraft is, and how fast it’s going.
The farther out in the spacecraft is, the longer it takes to receive and send a signal.
What if humans are sent to another planet like mars.
A two way system that sends a signal from earth to a spacecraft back to earth and then to spacecraft again would take an average of 40 minutes.
it would be better if the system was one-way allowing the explores to immediately their current position rather than waiting for that information to come back from earth.
NASA is testing new technology that would allow future explorers to do just that.
THE DEEP SPACE ATOMIC CLOCK is the first demonstration of an atomic clock that can be used for navigation in deep space .
it will allow a spacecraft to calculate its own trajectory, instead of depending on earth.
if a spacecraft had one of these clocks on board it could receive a signal from one of those big antennas on earth and quickly measure it’s speed and position .
The deep space atomic clock could one day let astronauts navigate safely and accurately to mars and beyond
