Washington: NASA has activated an atomic clock that could enable spacecraft to safely navigate themselves in deep space rather than rely on the time-consuming process of receiving directions from Earth.
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Launched in June, NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is now ready for its year-long tech demo, the US space agency said this week.
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Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the clock is the first timekeeper stable enough to map a spacecraft’s trajectory in deep space while being small enough to fly onboard the spacecraft.
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“The goal of the space experiment is to put the Deep Space Atomic Clock in the context of an operating spacecraft — complete with the things that affect the stability and accuracy of a clock — and see if it performs at the level we think it will: with orders of magnitude more stability than existing space clocks,” said navigator Todd Ely, principal investigator of the project at JPL.
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In the coming months, the team will measure how well the clock keeps time down to the nanosecond, NASA said.
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A more stable clock can operate farther from Earth, where it needs to work well for longer periods than satellites closer to home.
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Atomic clocks, like those used in GPS satellites, are used to measure the distance between objects by timing how long it takes a signal to travel from point A to point B.
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For space exploration, atomic clocks must be extremely precise: an error of even one second means the difference between landing on a planet like Mars or missing it by hundreds of thousands of miles.
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Up to 50 times more stable than the atomic clocks on GPS satellites, the mercury-ion Deep Space Atomic Clock loses one second every 10 million years, as proven in controlled tests on Earth. Now it will test that accuracy in space, NASA said.
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Navigators currently use refrigerator-size atomic clocks on Earth to pinpoint a spacecraft’s location.
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Minutes to hours can go by as a signal is sent from Earth to the spacecraft before being returned to Earth, where it is used to create instructions that are then sent back to the spacecraft.
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A clock aboard a spacecraft would allow the spacecraft to calculate its own trajectory, instead of waiting for navigators on Earth to send that information.
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This advancement would free missions to travel farther and, eventually, carry humans safely to other planets.
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