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P. S. Ray, K. S. Wood, R. M. Bandyopadhyay, G. Fritz, P. Hertz, M. P. Kowalski, M. N. Lovellette, M. T. Wolff, D. Yentis (E. O. Hulburt Center for Space Research, Naval Research Laboratory), E. Bloom, W. Focke, B. Giebels, G. Godfrey, K.T. Reilly, P. Saz Parkinson, G. Shabad (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University), J. Scargle (NASA/ Ames Research Center, Moffett Field), D. Backer, A. Somer (Astronomy Department, U. of California, Berkeley), USA Experiment Science Working Group
The USA Experiment on ARGOS is an X-ray proportional counter timing experiment, launched in January 1999, which is carrying out a broad program studying X-ray binaries, rotation-powered pulsars, and other bright X-ray sources. Photon events are time tagged to an accuracy of 2 \mus by reference to an onboard GPS receiver built by Boeing (then Rockwell International). Unfortunately, the GPS receiver has an anomaly that causes it to drop out of lock after a few hours. We describe the procedures developed to work around the GPS anomaly and recover accurate absolute time. Simultaneous observations of several rotation-powered pulsars with RXTE were made for comparison with contemporaneous radio timing measurements and to explore time transfer from satellite to satellite.
Basic research in X-ray Astronomy at the Naval Research Laboratory is supported by NRL/ONR. Work on USA at SLAC is supported by Department of Energy contract DE-AC03-76SF00515.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: Paul.Ray@nrl.navy.mil