military faced several challenges when the ground campaign began on February 24, 1991. “That information is especially important when you have very few landmarks or reference points as the troops did." GPS satellite orbits and update their navigation instructions. Schriever houses the master control station used to determine U.S. Air Force Space Command based at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. Anthony Mastalir, vice commander of the 50th Space Wing, U.S. forces in the Gulf War, primarily to address the age-old question of where am I, and where am I going?” says Col. “The introduction of GPS was particularly timely for U.S. Clearing Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait, however, required ground fighting, a daunting prospect for the Coalition members unaccustomed to desert warfare. The weeks-long air offensive unleashed stealth bombers, cruise missiles and laser-guided “smart” bombs on Iraq’s communications networks, weapons plants and oil refineries. and more than a dozen other countries launched Operation Desert Storm. In January 1991, months after Iraq’s invasion and occupation of neighboring Kuwait put the international community on alert, the U. GPS’s relatively weak signals are often unreliable and susceptible to interference, also known as “ jamming.” This has prompted the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to begin developing navigational aids that function when satellite access is unavailable. The navigation system has become so ubiquitous, in fact, that the Pentagon has come full circle and is investing tens of millions of dollars to help the military overcome its heavy dependence on the technology. GPS would change warfare and soon became an indispensible asset for adventurers, athletes and commuters as well. troops in particular would have had a much more difficult time navigating, communicating and guiding their weapons across the hundreds of kilometers of inhospitable, windswept desert battlefields in Kuwait and Iraq. Without their orbiting eyes in the sky U.S. Although the actual fighting did not take place in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, satellite-based global positioning systems (GPS) played a critical role in the Coalition’s rapid dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s military during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “Our research is continuing and we’re very excited about our results thus far.Twenty-five years ago U.S.-led Coalition forces launched the world’s first “ space war” when they drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. “Our device can be integrated in a platform with smaller batteries because it uses much less power than traditional rubidium sources and it is reversible, depending on the polarity of the voltage applied, so it works as a source or a sink,” Roper said. It will also keep the cold atoms cold for longer, enabling greater accuracy in atomic clocks, especially at higher operating temperatures. This will reduce measurement noise and increase accuracy when integrated into a cold-atom clock. The HRL device uses materials originally developed for batteries to remove only the warm rubidium atoms. The cooled atoms are trapped, and the more background warm atoms there are in the chamber, the weaker the signal-to-noise ratio is for the cold atoms, which reduces device accuracy. To operate at temperatures near 100 microkelvin, it is necessary to capture a subset of atoms from a warm vapor - a vapor of the alkali element rubidium in the HRL device - and cool them down. The HRL device could enable lighter weight platforms with fewer batteries or longer duration missions. Because modern communications, navigation, and electronic warfare depend on accurate timekeeping, according to DARPA the success of the CAMS program will benefit nearly every US defense system. This HRL research project, Solid Electrolyte Rubidium Vapor Orchestration (SERVO), was part of a larger Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program called Enabling Component Technology for Cold-Atom Microsystems (CAMS). Our device is a big step toward solving many of those problems.” The problem is that cold-atom clocks come with a whole host of added difficulties. “Scientists have managed to miniaturize room temperature atomic clocks, but cold-atom atomic clocks are much more accurate, so DARPA would like to have miniaturized versions of those too. “There are two basic types of atomic clocks, some operate at room temperature and some use atoms cooled down to just above absolute zero,” said Chris Roper, HRL’s project leader and senior author on the paper. The research on the device was published online Jin Applied Physics Letters. HRL Laboratories, LLC, researchers have developed a reversible alkali atom source that runs at low power and low voltage, which is beneficial in applications such as smaller, more efficient, and ultimately portable atomic clocks that use cold atoms.
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