When announcing the ROCkN program, DARPA outlined a plausible scenario: High-tech missiles, sensors, aircraft, ships, and artillery all rely on atomic clocks on GPS satellites for nanosecond timing accuracy a timing error of mere billionths of a second can translate to positioning being off by a meter or more.ĭefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its new Robust Optical Clock Network (ROCkN) program, which seeks to create low size, weight, and power (SWaP) optical atomic clocks that yield timing accuracy and holdover better than GPS atomic clocks and that can be used outside a laboratory. Still, the NIST team has put together something that. If the satellites' GPS signals were jammed by an adversary, time synchronization would rapidly deteriorate and thereby threaten military operations.ĭARPA officials state that ROCkN will leverage DARPA-funded research from the last several decades that has seen demonstration of the world’s most precise optical atomic clocks. Its also a long way from the DARPA timekeeping goal of erring by less than 1 microsecond per day. Although the clocks developed under the program will not be quite as as the best optical clocks found in a lab, they will surpass current state-of-the-art atomic clocks in both precision and holdover while maintaining low SWaP in a robust package. In this data set, the stability is y() 1.5x10-10 -1/2, from 1 to 100 seconds, roughly 4X better than the DARPA CSAC objective. Tatjana Curcic, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said of the ROCkN program: "The goal is to transition optical atomic clocks from elaborate laboratory configurations to small and robust versions that can operate outside the lab.
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