[Russia Today] MUST SEE! Stunning NASA image reveals surface of Saturn's Titan moon

Russia Today ^ | November 6, 2014 | Russia Today

[William Tell]

I think I'm getting a much better feel for this.

Given the incredible precision and accuracy of atomic clocks, one might be able to use the phase of the microwave transmissions from a spacecraft as the signals arrive at two earth stations to calculate position.

At roughly one nanosecond per foot of travel, the two stations might be able to resolve the difference in distance to the spacecraft to within a foot using a 1 GHz signal.

The angular precision of the position of the spacecraft in the sky might then be accurate to one foot in about 8000 miles. This would pin down the position of the craft to perhaps 1000 feet at a distance of 8,000,000 miles, or, extrapolated to a distance of 800 million miles, the position could be determined to within 100,000 feet, or about 20 miles.

Perhaps such a system could be ten times more precise than this, yielding an accuracy of 2 miles.

I can see where this would suffice for just about any purpose. Now I need to find out if this is really what happens.