The Satellite-Clock Lab

About this toy

This is a labelled toy model, not a real satellite. One honest idea runs everything: your map times satellite clocks to billionths of a second, and two real effects push those clocks opposite ways - speed slows them (7 millionths of a second a day) while weaker gravity high up speeds them (45) - so they end up 38 ahead every day, and engineers fix that on purpose. The arithmetic underneath is the real first-order relativity with the satellites' real altitude and speed, and you can audit every number.

What is real: the 7, the 45 and the 38 (NIST's own figures), the about-10-km-per-day map drift if nobody corrected the clocks, and the engineers' fix - satellite clocks really are set to tick slow before launch, and receivers correct the rest.

Left out on purpose: the drawn clock-rate gaps are enormously exaggerated so they can be SEEN (the real numbers stay on the screen), orbits are not to scale, and the relativity behind the two effects is taught in the sister labs (moving clocks, curved paths) rather than derived here. No real journeys or personal details are used; nothing about you leaves this page.

Sources: NIST ("Putting Einstein to the Test") and Ohio State Astronomy ("GPS and Relativity"). The links are in the project readme.