- 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