Transcript

Hundreds of atomic clocks are whizzing around above our heads in space. But if those clocks are off by even a few nanoseconds, they could send GPS systems, bank transfers, even electricity grids into chaos. So how do you keep time in Space 3? 21 festival you need to get there. Rocket launches are quite a violent experience for things on board, including the watches worn by astronauts, we have lift off. The powerful vibrations from lift off alone can send them out of whack in orbit. Microgravity messes with the clocks mechanisms and during a space walk temperatures swing from -150 to plus 100��C. IWC is currently working on the watches that will go up with astronauts in the world's first private space station next year. All of these things are completely new demands and different demands on a mechanical watch them what we used to have in aviation on Earth, where you're inside a nice cockpit most of the time and things are a lot more calm, I would say, in comparison to space flights. Even keeping your wrist watch running in space is an engineering miracle. But the real time keepers aren't astronauts. They're the atomic clocks orbiting Earth in satellites. There are hundreds of them each. Accurate to a billionth of a second, and they're absolutely crucial for modern life on Earth. Everything that we do in our daily lives relies on time. Telling the time to catch a train or how the train system operates and the signaling systems. Our phones. Similarly, the electricity grid. Take GPS for example. When you ask your phone for directions, it pings at least 4 satellites. Those satellites then tell your phone what time they think it is. By using that timestamp and measuring how long those signals take to reach you, your phone then works out your exact position. If the clocks were to be off by just a few nanoseconds, your location would be flung completely out. But keeping them precise is really hard because things move so quickly in orbit. Those satellites are actually whizzing round Earth at 10s of thousands of miles an hour. The clocks are actually ticking slightly slower than they would if they were sat here on Earth, but they're also further away from Earth, so they've got less gravity. That's kind of gravitational pull on them. So then that makes them tick slightly faster. So scientists have to account for those two opposing forces and they make them tick about 38 microseconds faster than the clocks would if they were sat here on Earth. If they didn't account for that, our GPS maps would be flung out by about 10 kilometres every single day. Now here at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington as a team of scientists working on these super precise clocks, trying to make them even more accurate. But the good news is you can leave that up to them. Even if you're a couple of minutes late, at least you'll know you're not trying to keep time and space.