On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Tom Knox <act...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > If pulsars are natures best clocks, I wonder how practical it would be to use > satellites to receive and rebroadcast a highly accurate timing signal based > on their signals?
The problem is in the rebroadcasting which will have the same problems as GPS. One needs to know the exact location of the satellite transmitter and there is the problem if the patch through the atmosphere effecting the signal in non-predictable ways. The solutions to these problem apply to GPS as well. There is also the problem of Doppler shift between Earth and the pulsar. For that reason you need to look at many of them and try and back all the shifts out to get a kind of average reference frame. A bet of processing is involved. You can't simply re-transmit the signal from one of them. Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ 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.