China to launch world’s first ‘cold’ atomic clock in space ... and it’ll stay accurate for a billion

The clock is ticking for the world’s most accurate working time piece, the NIST-F2 atomic clock operated by America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. And fittingly, the challenge is coming from the country that invented the mechanical clock almost 1,300 years ago – China. The US clock is a large, heavy machine, standing more than 2.5 metres high, with support facilities filling an entire room, but it is so accurate that it would lose just one second in 300 million years. More

(Source: South China Morning Post - Sep 16)