[time-nuts] Pulsars make a GPS for the cosmos

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Sat Sep 28 07:42:00 EDT 2013


On 9/28/13 4:14 AM, Magnus Danielson wrote:
> On 09/26/2013 08:25 PM, Tom Knox wrote:
>> It seems you would need to think of the Pulsar as the clock behind the GPS sat. You then have an algorithm to add the other need information at the rec end. To make things easier add to the constellation one master clock signal with corrections and other needed info from earth.
> With enough of them, you can compare their beatings against your local
> clock and use that to count backwards in order to establish the TAI
> relationship of your clock in rate and phase, if only reference phase
> and frequency observations where made and listed. You would not get
> leap-seconds and UTC, because that needs the earth spin observations,
> but you can get a fair TAI if you work the numbers.
>

Don't forget the Doppler and relativistic effects of the earth moving 
around the solar system barycenter.  But that's not much different than 
you do for GPS (e.g. knowing satellite orbits, etc.)



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