Goals
The microgravity environment of space allows slowing of atoms to speeds well below those used in terrestrial atomic clocks, providing for substantial improvement in clock accuracy. This very accurate space clock will be compared continuously to the SUMO oscillator, and these two clocks (being fundamentally different) will provide a test of "local position invariance." Comparisons between the space and earth clocks will yield a related, but important measurement of the gravitational frequency shift. Finally, the signals conveyed to the ground through the GPS time-transfer system will serve as a truly international time standard available to anyone on earth.
Read more about this topic: Primary Atomic Reference Clock In Space
Famous quotes containing the word goals:
“If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)