[time-nuts] Pulsar Source?

[Chris Albertson]

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Tom Knox <actast at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> If pulsars are natures best clocks, I wonder how practical it would be to use satellites to receive and rebroadcast a highly accurate timing signal based on their signals?

The problem is in the rebroadcasting which will have the same problems
as GPS.  One needs to know the exact location of the satellite
transmitter and there is the problem if the patch through the
atmosphere effecting the signal in non-predictable ways.   The
solutions to these problem apply to GPS as well.

There is also the problem of Doppler shift between Earth and the
pulsar.  For that reason you need to look at many of them and try and
back all the shifts out to get a kind of average reference frame.  A
bet of processing is involved.   You can't simply re-transmit the
signal from one of them.

Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California