Relativity in the Global Positioning System

By N. Ashby. Living Reviews in Relativity, 2003

606 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses accurate, stable atomic clocks in satellites and on the ground to provide world-wide position and time determination. These clocks have gravitational and motional frequency shifts which are so large that, without carefully accounting for numerous relativistic effects, the system would not work. This paper discusses the conceptual basis, founded on special and general relativity, for navigation using GPS. Relativistic principles and effects which must be considered include the constancy of the speed of light, the equivalence principle, the Sagnac effect, time dilation, gravitational frequency shifts, and relativity of synchronization. Experimental tests of relativity obtained with a GPS receiver aboard the TOPEX/POSEIDON satellite will be discussed. Recently frequency jumps arising from satellite orbit adjustments have been identified as relativistic effects. These will be explained and some interesting applications of GPS will be discussed.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0051a283289f3a26151e50268019b48d06aa3fcf

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In Aerospace Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Test of relativistic time dilation with fast optical atomic clocks at different velocities (2007, methodology): “The dye laser is scanned around ν((1,2)) a and the Lamb dip in the fluorescence is recorded with photomultipliers (PMTs) from the side; its frequency is measured with respect to the I2 clock in the laboratory frame.”
Single-frequency precise point positioning: an analytical approach (2015, methodology): “The models of the site-displacement effect are explained in detail in Petit and Luzum (2010), relativity is explained in Ashby (2003), the phase wind-up effect in Kouba (2009), and the satellite and receiver-antenna phase offsets and variations are explained in Schmid et al. (2007).”
The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment (2005, methodology): “This represents a welcome practical application of GR! (For the role of GR in GPS, see [15, 16]; for a popular essay, see [287].”