On the occasion of the project known as Cold Atomic Clock in Space, carried out by a team of scientists from Shanghai, China has just put into orbit what has been baptized as the world's most accurate atomic clock. As published in South China Morning PostWe are talking about a system that would be more expensive than the clock operated by the University of Colorado and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States.
What is an atomic clock? As mentioned, we are talking about a device that should only lose a second every 30 million years. As expected, this new device will have civil and military applications and will be aimed at improving future mobile navigation, which could be even more precise than that achieved by conventional systems that work via GPS. With all this, it is not surprising that its creation and launch means that we are facing one of the devices that has caused the most expectation in recent years.
Its creators predict that this atomic clock will lose one second every 30 million years
This atomic clock has been put into orbit as a complement to the second space laboratory developed by the eastern country, the Tiangong-2. We are talking about what for China is the first step in an ambitious exploration program for which the country's government intends to have a real manned space station from 2022. The probe is the second version of Tiangong-1, the first laboratory China launched into space in 2011.
With the dispatch of the atomic clock within this second experimental station, the Asian country completes a work cycle related to the space exploration. The launch's success comes weeks after China launched Cinema, the first quantum communication satellite, in space.