In message <4e7d0353.2040...@earthlink.net>, Jim Lux writes: >But as we move towards constellations of spacecraft with LONG light time >to earth, that whole time correlation process needs to be done >autonomously. So the process of converting "local count" to "time in >some universally agreed scale" and back has to be done locally.
Doesn't GR sort of make "universally agreed scale" a pretty interesting concept ? But more importantly, have you done any estimates of the precision/ required input ratio for this ? I would seriously look into broadcasting a usable time signal to the constellation of vehicles, to use as common reference, rather than have each of them attempt dead reckoning of their own clock to a paper timescale, which quickly runs into sensor input limitations. By broadcast I don't mean you have to build an antenna tower, there are plenty of suitable signals out there already. Presumably they are going to point an antenna back at earth, adding a small newtonian telescope with a long-IR sensor next to it, should give you a signal with a interestingly complex but mostly periodic waveform, which the vehicles in the constellation can use as "conductors baton". Other candidates are Jupiters moons (always a favourite), pulsars (Probably needs to big antennae?) GRB's &c. >A pox on "put it in XML".. As far as I'm concerned that's no better >than saying "put it in an ASCII text file". Well, it's easier to deal with newlines in strings in XML, but otherwise I fully agree :-) -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
