By knowing how long it takes for signals to go to different locations in space, how can this help with the study of the Solar System?
ANSWER from Steve Wall on January 31, 1997: That’s a really good question. When you’re curious about the way something works, the first thing to think about is what ways you have of finding out about it – what you can see, or smell, or measure that has to do with it. We use the time it takes for signals to travel in several different ways. Most directly, the time tells us how far away objects are. If the signals come from an object (like the light or radio signals from stars, or the radio signals from our spacecraft), we also can use the way that signal changes to tell us what direction it comes from. We can tell how far away something is because we know how fast signals travel and we can use the time it takes to tell us the distance. We can tell the direction by listening to the pitch, or frequency, of the signal to tell if the object is coming closer or going farther away. Once we know how far away things are and where they are, we can start to think about how the positions of things
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