The most accurate rumur that is set to launch – and count down to destruction

The most accurate clock in the space launch within a few days and will begin to build a very synchronized network out of the best watches on Earth. But the project, decades in preparation, will only operate for a few years before it burns up as International Space Station Deorbits at the end of the decade.

The nuclear ensemble of space (ACES) is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will generate a time signal with apred accuracy and then transmit it via laser to nine grinding stations as it passes overhead at 27,000 kilometers per hour. This network of watches will be in extremely close sync and give very accurate timers around the world.

The result is that ACEs will be able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which knows that time is affected by gravity with great accuracy. It will also help with research on everything from dark matter to string theory.

ACES is scheduled for launch on April 21 on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Once on the ISS, the Canadian Space Agency Robot arm – Canadarm2 – will attach it to the outer of ESAS Columbus Laboratory, where it will remain in the space vacuum.

The package, recently understood two watches: one called SHM has the ability to remain stable for short periods, which allows it to help calibrate the other, called Pharao. Together, these watches will be so accurate that they would lose less than a second over 300 million years – 10 times more accumulates than unclean on board GPS satellites.

Pharaoh is basically modeled on an atomic clock in Paris that occupied an entire room. Miniaturization of this technology for something that takes less than a cubic meter, and can also survive the rigority of a rocket launch and life in space was no mean.

To generate an exact watch signal, Pharaoh, a fountain with cesium atoms to almost absolutely zero and observes their interaction with microwave fields. On the ground, this requires a unit up to 3 meters high, but in microgravity these atoms can be sprayed in a slower moving and smaller fountain, so it can be much smaller.

Simon Weinberg at ESA says the device is so sensitive that putting a teaspoon of it could create an electromagnetic field string enough to destroy the clock. “Just to put it in the context, it’s better than a thousand million of a second that we try to measure here,” says Weinberg. “So it’s a hell of a challenging job.”

The concept for ACEs dates back to the 1990s and was originally planned for launch on the space shuttle that retired in 2011. When it comes to space, the first signal does not arrive at a grounded clock for a year and a half – it will take about six months to order the unit, and then it is worth measuring to insulate the noise and remove it from the clock signal.

Then ACES works until 2030, after which ISS will deliberately crash into the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up. At that time, it is likely that new Super-Accurate Timepieces known as optical watches have made atomic all except obsolete on earth, although they may not be small or robust enough for use in space at that time.

Weinberg says ESA at one point seems to be launching a new generation of aces to replace what’s lost on ISS with the most appropriate technology is at the time. “We would be far away from doing so, and we would have been to bring together the Totther Support and Funding and so on to make sure it happened.”