It was 2:30 in the morning when astronautical engineer Todd Ely watched as a little atomic clock—the size of a four-slice toaster—was launched in

This Atomic Clock Will Transform Deep Space Exploration

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2021-10-20 23:30:07

It was 2:30 in the morning when astronautical engineer Todd Ely watched as a little atomic clock—the size of a four-slice toaster—was launched into space on a satellite attached to one of the most powerful rockets in the world. He distinctly remembers a bright flash and a beating vibration that lasted long after the light went dim. “You feel it in your chest,” he recalls.

Also at the site was Ely’s colleague Eric Burt, a physicist who is an expert on atomic clocks. Despite all of the shake tests they had performed beforehand to ensure their delicate device could endure the journey into space, the violence of the launch left Burt in disbelief. “The whole Earth shakes,” he remembers. “I watched it from three miles away, thinking: How is our little clock going to ever survive?”

But it did. Ely and Burt are two leaders of the Deep Space Atomic Clock project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and in September—more than two years after the clock’s deployment into low Earth orbit—the clock’s satellite was powered off, marking the end of its first mission. It’s the most precise clock to ever operate in space, and it’s paving the way for making real-time navigation of the cosmos a reality. “A robust onboard navigation system is going to be a fundamental component to human exploration beyond Earth,” says Ely, the project’s principal investigator. “And our clock can play a role in that.”