Submitted by [deleted] t3_zu704d in askscience
DirtFoot79 t1_j1jpkqq wrote
Reply to comment by Duros001 in Are people in the international space station experiencing time faster than us? by [deleted]
You are right about the time dialation effect. But you should be aware of how great those effects are. To think the time dialation effect would impact GPS calculations by 10 km a day.
I'm going to copy info from https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html#:~:text=As%20such%2C%20when%20viewed%20from,by%2045%20microseconds%20per%20day.
"Further, the satellites are in orbits high above the Earth, where the curvature of spacetime due to the Earth's mass is less than it is at the Earth's surface. A prediction of General Relativity is that clocks closer to a massive object will seem to tick more slowly than those located further away (see the Black Holes lecture). As such, when viewed from the surface of the Earth, the clocks on the satellites appear to be ticking faster than identical clocks on the ground. A calculation using General Relativity predicts that the clocks in each GPS satellite should get ahead of ground-based clocks by 45 microseconds per day.
The combination of these two relativitic effects means that the clocks on-board each satellite should tick faster than identical clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day (45-7=38)! This sounds small, but the high-precision required of the GPS system requires nanosecond accuracy, and 38 microseconds is 38,000 nanoseconds. If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day!"
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