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>> [Narrator] How do we navigate through space?
Currently, spacecraft flying beyond Earth
don’t have a GPS to find their way through space.
Navigators on Earth send a signal to the spacecraft,
which receives it and sends it back.
Extremely precise clocks on the ground, called atomic clocks,
measure how long it takes the signal
to make this two-way journey.
The amount of time tells them how far away the spacecraft is,
and how fast it’s going.
The farther out in space the spacecraft is,
the longer it takes to receive and send a signal.
But what if humans are sent to another planet like Mars?
A two-way system
that sends a signal from Earth to a spacecraft,
back to Earth and then to the spacecraft again
would take an average of 40 minutes.
Imagine if the GPS on your phone
took 40 minutes to calculate your position.
You might miss your turn, or be several exits down the highway
before it caught up with you.
If humans travel to the Red Planet,
it would be better if the system was one-way,
allowing the explorers to immediately
determine their current position rather than waiting
for that information to come back from Earth.
NASA is testing new technology
that would allow future explorers to do just that.
The Deep Space Atomic Clock is the first demonstration of an
atomic clock that can be used for navigation in deep space.
It will allow a spacecraft to calculate its own trajectory,
instead of depending on Earth.
If a spacecraft had one of these clocks on board,
it could receive a signal from one of those
big antennas on Earth,
and quickly measure its speed and position.
The Deep Space Atomic Clock could one day let astronauts
navigate safely and accurately to Mars and beyond.
This technology demonstration is the first step in making one-way
space navigation a reality.
[Explore Space Tech]
[NASA]