Changes in My Lifetime - Space

Navigation and Relativity

I'm amazed by the accuracy of interplanetary navigation, but I don't know of any significant event along the way. Relativistic corrections are significant.

I've heard that the radar data of Venus from Haystack was good enough to improve the orbital parameters of Jupiter.

A friend at the VLA reports that they ran into a glitch when they were helping NASA track an interplanetary probe. The data wasn't nearly as good as they were expecting. It all made sense after they updated their blue-shift corrections to start part way into the Earth's gravity well rather than at infinity.

GPS was a good test of Relativity, both Special and General. Without corrections, a 10 MHz signal derived from the clocks in the GPS satellites would be off by 4 mili-Hz. wiki

Fourth Test of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity at Haystack.

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