Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Q: Satellites experience less time because they’re moving fast, but more time because they’re so high. Is there an orbit where the effects cancel out? Is that useful?

http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/03/q-satellites-experience-less-time-because-theyre-moving-fast-but-more-time-because-theyre-so-high-is-there-an-orbit-where-the-effects-cancel-out-is-that-useful/
The original question was: I read that due to time dilation from both gravity and speed, GPS satellites need their clocks adjusted to match Earth’s time or else the whole idea would fall flat on its face. So my question is wouldn’t there be a natural way to match the GPS clocks with Earth by simply having the time dilation from movement offset the time dilation from gravity? How fast would they have to orbit the Earth to cancel out the gravitational time dilation?

No comments:

Post a Comment