Autumn 2011
- The perfect storm: Can disaster reduction occur in the face of climate change and population growth?
- Voicing Slavery: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Prince
- Osteoporosis: Bouncing babies to crumbling wrinklies - the need to own our bones
- What has the King’s Speech done to improve public awareness about stuttering?
- Photons, spacecraft, atomic clocks and Einstein – fundamental physics in the space environment
- London: the divorce capital of the world. ‘Big money’ divorce cases: fairness, gender and judicial discretion
- When technology design provokes errors
- Prometheus and I: building new body parts from stem cells
- Against nature? Homosexuality and evolution
- Child development in developing countries
- Did Democracy Cause the American Civil War?
- The highs and lows of our nearest star, the Sun
- From pathogen to ally: engineering viruses to treat disease
- Designing for students
- The price of the pouch: the evolutionary ramifications of mammalian reproductive strategies
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Photons, spacecraft, atomic clocks and Einstein – fundamental physics in the space environment
2 November 2011
Thursday 27 October 2011
Professor Marek Ziebart (UCL Space Geodesy and Navigation)
Satellites designed, built and launched by humans orbit the earth to carry out a myriad of tasks, friendly and hostile, commercial and scientific. Many of these missions supply critical data to model, mitigate and predict planet-scale processes such as El Nino events, sea level rise, plate tectonics and the earthquake cycle. The spacecraft move at between 4 and 8 kilometres per second, and are between 500 and 20,000 km above the earth’s surface but for scientific purposes we need to know where they are to within a few centimetres, and we need to know the time they transmit their signals at the nano-second level. This lecture explains how that is achieved using concepts from fundamental physics.
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