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ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA ›› 2023, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (3): 526566.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2022.26566

• Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Correcting frequency of a spaceborne atomic clock using X-ray observations of Crab pulsar

Minglei TONG1,2(), Mengna HAN1,2, Tinggao YANG1, Chengshi ZHAO1, Xingzhi ZHU1,2   

  1. 1.National Time Service Center,Chinese Academy of Sciences,Xi’an  710600,China
    2.University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,Beijing  100049,China
  • Received:2021-10-25 Revised:2021-11-24 Accepted:2022-01-12 Online:2023-02-15 Published:2022-01-18
  • Contact: Minglei TONG E-mail:mltong@ntsc.ac.cn
  • Supported by:
    National SKA Program of China(2020SKA0120103);National Natural Science Foundation of China(U1831130)

Abstract:

To improve the long-term time-keeping ability of a spaceborne atomic clock and improve its autonomy, this paper proposes a method for steering the frequency of the spaceborne atomic clock by using the Crab pulsar data observed by XPNAV-1 satellite. In the X-ray pulsar timing processing, we use the Gaussian kernel regression method to smooth the pulsar profile, which can effectively improve the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of the pulsar profile and timing precision. By simulating the frequency deviation of the reference clock recording the photon arrival times, the influence of the frequency deviation of the reference clock on pre-fit timing residuals is analyzed. Based on this, a method for frequency calibration of the spaceborne atomic clock is given. For the spaceborne clock with frequency deviation of order 10-11, the frequency calibration accuracy with relative error of about 40% can be obtained from the Crab Pulsar data for about one month. It is expected that the frequency calibration accuracy of spaceborne clock can be further improved by using the pulsar timing data with a longer time span.

Key words: pulsar, atomic clock, X-ray pulsar timing, frequency steering, timing residual

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