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NASA To Test New Atomic Clock
edesio writes "Many satellites and spacecraft require accurate timing signals to ensure the proper operation of scientific instruments. In the case of GPS satellites, accurate timing is essential, otherwise anything relying on GPS signals to navigate could be misdirected. The third technology demonstration planned by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the Deep Space Atomic Clock. The DSAC team plans to develop a small, low-mass atomic clock based on mercury-ion trap technology and demonstrate it in space."
Maybe this one will be able to do something as simple as timing neutrinos properly.
...and I think NASA might actually get some of their funding back...
I'm not so sure that I can support anything radioactive while the poor people in Japan are dealing with their atomic disaster and remember Chernobyl? people can't live there anymore. All because of atomic clocks
Sundial.
You know what's frightening?
Many people would actually believe you.
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BMO
If you have an idea, try and prove it wrong (alot), if you can't, then your idea stands. This goes for relativity too, but dancing around just saying "it's wrong, haha!" gets you a Cool story bro award attached to a tin foil hat.
Having once worked on GPS Satellite's clocking system, I was surprised that the AF was so against usage of atomic clocks phased-locked to crystals for accurate timing. Maybe the latest news about Galileo using atomic clock changed their mind?
You certainly typed a lot of words to say "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about". As far as scientific theories go relativity has a lot of very strong experimental support. Though I suppose if you want to say it's "obviously wrong" you might want to include some actual experimental verification or even peer reviewed papers of such a claim, you know, to enlighten us bozos.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Well, you're definitely not crazy!
That's a special kind of crazy you've got going there.
Besides your link to some dude's blog, what is your support for saying Einstein's theories are "obviously wrong"?
If his theories are wrong, how do you deal with the fact that they have been supported with countless experiments, and our GPS system depends on his theories to keep accurate timings down to the billionth of a second?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
but it will take........TIME!!!!! Muahahahhahahaha!
I did point to my article, where you can find the proof. It's just plain logic and common sense.
We'll see how it turns out. I just know I did my homework.
"don't think of conspiracies, think of sharks swimming in parallel lines." - John Loftus
And you link to a blog which states
"This way, the scientific establishment will slowly but surely be forced to return to reality, the reality of the existence of a real, physical ether with fluid-like properties."
You realize that the "ether" theory has been absolutely blown out of the water, right? Countless experiments were conducted to determine our motion through this either. all experiments showed the speed of light does not depend on the observer's velocity. It was only after these countless experiments that science finally accepted that there is no absolute vantage point.
But if you don't even understand this, you should presume to disagree with Einstein. Free speech may entitle you to disagree... but free speech also entitles the rest of us to call you out for the uninformed person that you are.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Oh, that is YOUR article? BWAHAHAHAAA. Sorry, I will stop arguing with you now. Only an idiot continues to argue with fools.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
... you might have heard about PHARAO, a caesium clock which is planned to fly on the ISS in 2013. Accuracy target is 1E-16.
One thing that the Internet never fails to deliver is crazy people with theories about physics. Who's the bigger fool, the fool, or the fool who follows him? You need to stop reading wacky physics advice from Internet crazies and find something better to do with your time. The reason you've gotten no replies after forwarding your silly link to physics professors is that physics professors are inundated with stupid articles claiming that relativity is wrong, or the number of spatial/temporal dimensions is wrong, or thermodynamics is wrong, or whatever. Most of them have given up on trying to refute people with wrong ideas because crazy people can't be reasoned with, and it's a complete waste of time. But look at me, trying to reason with an Internet Physics Crazy; apparently, I haven't learned my own lesson.
It's my own site, I pointed to....
Einstein's theory stands or falls with the speed of light being constant. Since that depends on the properties of the medium, apparantly these are pretty constant in the vicinity of the planet, which is why the theory gives you the correct numbers in 99 out of 100 cases. You'd expect anomalies further out in space, and that is exactly what you see. Take the Pioneer anomaly, for example. That also only gives slight deviations of what is supposed to happen now the probes are very far out in space.
However, the root of the error is very obvious. Either matter is some kind of EM wave, as QM theory and the wave-particle duality principle says, and is therefore the result of the EM fields, or matter (charge carriers) is the cause for the EM fields to exist. And you simple can't have it both ways at the same time. It's one or the other.
"don't think of conspiracies, think of sharks swimming in parallel lines." - John Loftus
The "impossible" particles are likely due to miscalculation of relativity effects due to GPS satellites moving. The "impossible" star is possible under the laws of physics, but so improbable that it goes against theories of the exact sequence of events leading to a star's formation, and has nothing to do with relativity. The Pioneer anomaly has many possible causes, few of which involve a new cosmological theory.
Sorry, but worship of Tesla is just as bad as worship of Einstein.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The Pioneer anomaly has been explained by far less exotic answers... thermal radiation pressure is the likely culprit. Sorry, but you sound like a conspiracy theorist more than a scientist.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Tesla was a genius, and in the quote you gave I believe he was right... but also wrong. Space cannot curve if space is nothing. But space is not nothing. The work of people like Riemann and Lobachevski have shown that space can in fact possess properties inherently. This makes a kind of sense: when we talk about 5 feet of space, that space has an objective reality and possesses some property (namely, dimension) that allows use to quantify it. Einstein deals with this question somewhat BTW.
Interestingly enough, if you go back to the philosophy of people like Aristotle, "matter" can possess any level of properties, including (in theory) insensate but quantitative dimensionality (i.e. "empty" space). So space could be "material" in this original sense, allowing for curvature, yet be "empty", in the sense that it lacks tangibility (which is really what we mean by "empty" anyways).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
ESA will get there first, with the Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES), intended for the ISS in 2013, which should be good to ~ 10**-16 and will include a test of relativity. I believe that this is the JPL clock, which is aiming at 10**-15 stability, and a 2015 launch. (Both are fairly low earth orbits, with the JPL clock intended for an Iridium satellite.)
So, the JPL effort is cool, and I would love to see one flown to Mars or truly deep space, but this is one case where the Europeans are in the lead.
An atomic clock could just measure radiation as harmless as the one the sun sends out your way... every second of every day... Billions of times...
I know you were trying to be ironic, but the "it's atomic so it must be bad" just irks me.
As for energy... Solar and Fusion's the way to go, it's just more complicated to do it "Right".
We never seem to get things "right" we always stop at getting the shortcuts... and then we complain we have problems...
Deep Space Atomic Clock.... what does this have with "deep space"? GPS satellites are on medium Earth orbits... or did the space constricted so much now that NASA operates no shuttles?
(letting aside that... heck... what should it have anything to do with "space"? It's an atomic clock, does it need 0-g to function?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
To be safe, you probably ought to keep your sincerity in your Mom's basement until it decays into undetectable quantities, say within three days. Make it "movie weekend" and you'll have a plausible cover story.
Based on the relativity theory though, humans are pretty much earthbound, Mars at best. 1 light year = guess what?
To achieve anything significant in the universe, it's pretty obvious it needs to be broken.
All of our theories, laws and measurements are earth based and earth bound.
Now Einstein's theory is probably 100% on planet earth in our current physics model, but I'ma laugh if you say it applies to a place in space thousands of light years away. It very well may, but neither you nor I can prove that, and pixelated images from a space telescope aren't going to reverse that chain of thinking.
Also Einstein wasn't aware of the physics picture we have going on right now with quantum mechanics and subatomic particles.
I think the goal is to ultimately evolve our physics model to compensate for new discoveries and hopefully utilize them.
Also, in regards to not knowing what your talking about...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524911.600-13-things-that-do-not-make-sense.html
there's some food for thought in regards to shit nobody knows what they're talking about... including... YOU!
Lastly, there's a more than a few links on this from various places...
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/would-einsteins-theory-of-relativity-be-proved-false/187145-11.html
It's all speculation at this point, I'm certainly not saying it's going to be broken by a long shot, but as I stated at the top, it needs to be to coincide with all those sci-fi movies and keeping an open mind never hurt anyone.
I'd take a one size fits all cure for cancer before this shit though.
Last week the newspapers were filled with the discovery of "impossible" particles traveling faster than the speed of light.
And while Relativity must be subjected to the highest standards of evidence(and is), this discovery of course must be accepted as the complete truth as soon as it comes out.
earlier the Pioneer space probes also refused to adhere to the law
I love how the Pioneer Anomaly is always used as proof of whatever crackpot theory someone wants it to, or dis-proof of whatever theory they want to discredit even if only tangentially related. But in reality, anomalies like this are usually best understood by more fully understanding the circumstances. For example, once someone went to the trouble to more accurately model the way light would reflect off of the Pioneer probe's structure, suddenly the Pioneer "anomaly" went away.
Oh, I'm sorry, was I only allowed to assume that all of science was wrong when figuring out what was going on with a weird observation? Theories are fair game, but the methodologies and calculations used to determine if the theory's predictions are correct can't be updated? It was called an "anomaly" before, ergo Relativity must be wrong?
And... you think this is a more intelligent way of approaching science?
In the future they will look back to relativity with equal disbelief as to the "Earth is flat" concept.
You mean they'll view it as a theory that fit all available evidence better than any other available theory, up until the time that it didn't and then it was abandoned? You're probably right. BTW, that happened a lot earlier than most of you folks who trot out the Flat Earth Theory think. The earth was understood to be round, and even it's circumference calculated with a surprising degree of accuracy, in around 200 B.C. But comparing Relativity to the Spherical Earth Theory (which is wrong) would be too honest.
Relativity, like the flat or spherical earth theories, will last as long as it's the best theory -- and unlike the Flat Earth, but more like Classical mechanics, it is likely going to be close enough to correct that it will still be used for a wide variety of circumstances even in this hypothetical future you envision.
The relativity theory not only goes against common sense
Quantum Electrodynamics pisses all over your precious "common sense" while cackling like Pennywise the Clown, yet it has been verified experimentally to 15 decimal places.
Even basic probability goes against common sense, but guess which one does a better job of predicting what you should bet on a hand in poker.
But hey, I have to admit, Tesla said Relativity had to be wrong, so I guess it must be.
But wait, those mainstream scientists who "worship" Albert Einstein still adhere to QED and QM even though Einstein said they didn't make sense and he didn't like them.
Gee, I wonder which group of people it is -- mainstream science or "rebel" science --that actually evaluates theories on their merits, and which just picks authority figures who say what they want to hear?
physical ether with fluid-like properties... a fundamental thinking error has been made by Maxwell in his equations.
Kinda funny how they propose an aether theory, while also saying Maxwell is wrong (despite truly ridiculous amounts of verification), when the whole reason the aether theory was proposed in the first place was to explain how the speed of light in a vacuum could be constant, as implied by Maxwell's equations, in the presence of relative motion.
Keeping my fingers crossed....
And that's... pretty much all you're doing, isn't it? Scientists have been subjecting their theories to every test they can come up with, developing alternative ones and comparing the predictions they make to the evidence, and seeing which comes out best and picking that one. Crackpots pick one or two things that are difficult to explain, claim that proves them completely right and everything else wrong, and ignore the mountains of evidence their crackpot theory can't explain.
The enemies of Democracy are
Before they can get that TARDIS project working.
Wow my list of science deniers has AGW denialists, anti-vax'ers, stem cell denialists and now a theory of relativity denialist!
Best line in your article:
And because space is not physical at all, it can have no physical properties.
XD
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Heh. That's nothing new, really. Ever heard of The Electric Universe? Whole gaggle of crackpots who claim the universe is dominated by electricity while simultaneously not understanding it. Not only is Relativity out for them, but even Newtonian gravity doesn't explain the motion of planets as far as they're concerned.
I gotta admit, though, this is a new take on crackpottery and that's always amusing.
Not quite as amusing as the Conservation of Momentum/Energy Denialist that was haunting Slashdot for a while. That was pretty impressive.
The enemies of Democracy are
Thankfully with this audience, you'd need an atomic clock to measure the time it would take to realise that the GP is a troll.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Time keeping is getting better and better. I just happened upon this article recently which gives some history on timekeeping and what some of the latest efforts are working on: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/334983/title/The_Ultimate_Clock.
Here's an excerpt (emphasis added):
Einstein's theory stands or falls with the speed of light being constant.
Yeah, and so far our experiments have confirmed that over and over again. That doesn't mean that the theory is right, in fact we know that it is very likely wrong, as it doesn't play nice with quantum mechanics, but science isn't about right or wrong or finding absolute truth, it's about finding the best theory to explain and predict our observations and so far the theory is the best we got. If our experiments get more detailed and unexplainable reproducible errors show up, then we might need to update the theory, but that hasn't happened yet.
Take the Pioneer anomaly, for example.
This one?
What you are doing is Anomaly Hunting, one tiny unreproducible glitch in the data doesn't mean that we have to through all our working theories out of the window, it means that we have to either explain the glitch or look for a way to reproduce it.
There's a huge difference in size, mass, and power between PHARAO (which has impressive peformance) and the JPL DSAC/SpaceClock.
The former is 91 kg and draws 114 watts and is a meter long. The Hg+ ion clock is notionally 1 liter/1kg and a few watts.
Considering that for a deep space probe, a couple hundred kilos is the whole spacecraft and a couple hundred watts is the total power budget, that's the value of DSAC/SpaceClock.
Experiment: You measure 1 meter out, and then turn 90 degrees to your right, measure 1 meter out, turn 90 degrees right, and measure 1 meter, how far will you be from the starting point? Answer: 1 meter
Similar experiment: You measure 1 km, turn 90 degrees, and do this twice more, how far will you be from the starting position? Answer: 1 km
Similar experiment: You measure 10,000 km, turn 90 degrees, and do this twice more, how far will you be from the starting position? Answer: Approx. 0 km (Why? Because the earth is nearly spherical with a circumference of around 40,000 km, and you have traversed 1/4 of that distance along 3 geodesics, leading back to your starting position.)
This is why that quote by Tesla is incorrect. You cannot assume that local flat measurements mean that space is naturally flat. It may be naturally curved. If your assumption is that the earth is flat, you might reject the third experiment. But the third experiment helps to verify that the earth is naturally round. Likewise if you assume that space is Euclidean, then you might reject large-scale measurements that seem inconsistent with local measurements. But there is the problem again: you reject measurements that are out of line with your assumptions. (In fact, a property of any Reimannian manifold is that it is smooth, meaning it is possible to "zoom in" far enough anywhere such that local measurements would be consistent with a flat manifold.)
Sorry, didn't read all the rest of your article.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
It is possible to not break relativity, but go faster than the speed of light. It all comes down to how speed is defined - and it turns out that relativity has a fairly narrow definition.
Great Intellect...
the deep space clock will be accurate to 1 second every umpteen million years, but will need to be reset in a couple of weeks due to the change from daylight time to standard time.
I stand corrected.
--
BMO
You can't hug your children with Nuclear Arms.
He can't be that stupid. Maybe we've been trolled.
Wow, wrong thread.
--
BMO
This project is clearly socialism.
If you think anything a government does is socialism.
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make install -not war
Just because you don't know what the hell you're talking about doesn't mean no one else knows what they're talking about.
You're stupid.
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make install -not war
The constant speed of light is constant only in a given medium. Not only Einstein, but plenty of other scientists and mathematicians have covered that completely. Einstein's models account for different media.
You're just another childish egotist who thinks Einstein's work was some kind of great big "gotcha", so you'll just pull one off yourself.
You're stupid. Shut up.
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make install -not war
No, nobody would believe them. That's why they had to make it up, and get another clown to say many people would believe them.
You nuke fetishists are so desperate now that Japan nuked itself that you have to invent people to believe the BS you make up, even when that BS is against yourselves.
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make install -not war
and what a surprise..Made in China. Can't wait for this one.
Also a lot of words to say "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about".
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What I did is study quite a lot of material on Electrical Engineering, which is also the discipline I hold a Masters degree in. Then I connected the work of Dr. Charles Kenneth Thornhill and Prof. Konstantin Meyl and thus discovered ecactly where a fundamental thinking error was made in the Maxwell equations. Matter is some kind of EM wave phenomenon and therefore it is caused by the fields. So, when you postulate that the fields are caused by charge carriers, matter, you mix up cause and effect, which ultimately leads to the conclusion that the relativity theory can't be correct, as you can read in my article.
In related news, CERN's FTL neutrinos are only (c*1.8m) early, not 18m as measured before.
Were you a Payload Officer at 2 SOPS? And, are you referring to the Space or Ground segment? If you mean the backup clocks in the Mod, then that's slightly outside my knowledge. As far as the Space Segment, they've been reliably using Cesium and Rubium (atomic) clocks for over 3 decades. They don't want to change because it's known, reliable, etc. I was curious to note the newest generation of satellites dropped the 4th clock, and now launch with only 3. Since each clock is only usable a number of years (varies too much for me to generalize), I'd have thought they kept all four just in case the electrical system outlives normal design life, and you end up needing to go with a 4th clock when the 3rd one becomes too "deviant".
I think the GPS relevence is buried at the bottom of the article. Cesium and Rubidium clocks are both accurate to the nanosecond. That's just about as accurate as can be practical. The new atomic clock, however, they're saying is accurate LONGER. On GPS Satellites, the original satellites (Block I, II, IIA, IIR) launched with Cesium and Rubidium, 2 each. Usually you have one operational, sometimes one on "ready standby", and the other two off. As each atomic clock reaches the end of its mission-usable life, it's turned off. It become's "mission-unusable" (not a real term, I just made that up) when it's signal varies outside a normal window of acceptable predictability in terms of its output signal. There are design differences, such as Rubidium clocks have to stay within a tenth of a degree (F) in temperature stability (if memory serves correct). So, if they can create a clock that's more stable, for a longer period of time, this has huge potential for future GPS satellites. However, since we just awarded contract to Boeing the contract for IIF birds, with only 2 of 12 launched, it's going to be a very long time (decade at best) before you'd see this in a GPS satellite. Design life has also expanded from 7 to 12 years for each satellite (for point of reference Block I only had a design life of 3 years since they were R&D), so this pushes any usage even farther out since we're going to go longer before replacements need to be launched.
Wow, wrong thread.
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BMO
So, you stand incorrected?
A Conservation of Energy denier? Wow how does that work? Sounds like it could be a troll presenting Troll Science with a serious face.
I've seen plenty of crackpot forums but you don't expect their users to post on Slashdot. The Flat Earth Society is hilarious, but a lot of people say it's a big joke, like if Conservapedia was run entirely by Conservatroll players.
If they were serious they would be the most vocal environmentalist protesters, because if that ice wall melts most of the water would fall off the world.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Your a fuckin retard for even replying to any post. There's a hole somewhere for you, it's not on the internet though.
You can't hug your children with Nuclear Arms.
I don't see why not -- just take your nuclear arms, gently put them around the child, and there you go. Is it because it's too difficult to make a tactical nuke small enough that the human skeleton and shoulder muscles would be able to lift it? If we're replacing the arms with nukes anyway, why not enhance the rest of the body so that it could? Seems like an engineering problem to me.
Wait, I get the feeling I'm missing something...
The enemies of Democracy are
Well, they weren't explicitly a CoE denier. They were explicitly a CoM denier who was just ignorant of the connection... They proposed an Aristotlean theory of motion, where an object maintaining non-zero momentum required a constant input of energy, and you could use this universal energy to ignore momentum and instantly start and stop or turn 90 degrees like the old Light Cycles from Tron.
They easily could have been a troll, but they went to a lot of trouble for it. They had their own blog with a lengthy screed about how Newton and every other scientist since was wrong and Aristotle was right and how obvious it all was. Even had out-of-context quotes from The Principia that tried to make it seem like even Newton knew that his laws of motion were bunk.
Could have been a troll, same as this current joker. Seems like lot of effort just to demonstrate Poe's Law, but people have done weirder things.
Personally I think The Flat Earth Society is a mix of people who are laughing their ass off and people who are earnest. Probably started as a joke, but once you agree to pretend to take it seriously, you'll inevitably attract people that really do believe it.
And obviously those people aren't smart enough to understand the environmental and other implications of their belief. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
But you can deliver the Mother Of All Spankings.
Linux is not a religion. It is a collection of logic. Stop being stupid.
Because of the mercury ions, use will be banned in the EU and California.