THE APL TIME AND FREQUENCY LAB

摘要

The APL Time and Frequency Laboratory supports a wide variety of current and upcoming NASA missions that span the solar system from the study of the Sun’s coronal mass ejections to the examination of the planet Pluto and the Kuiper Belt objects. This support can be in the form of providing precise time and frequency to the integration and testing of new hardware or the time-stamping of ground-receipt telemetry packets from various spacecraft. The Lab’s ensemble of three cesium standards and one hydrogen maser will soon be expanded with the procurement of two additional hydrogen masers. Also, a new frequency stability measurement system is capable of making up to once-per-second picosecond level phase measurements at 5 MHz from each clock in the ensemble. Traceability to USNO, NIST, and BIPM is maintained via GPS common-view time transfer and will provide a means for incorporating the Lab’s clocks into the computation of TAI.