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Old 16th September 2010 | 20:50
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Keith.Williams.
 
Joined: Aug 2001
Posts: 775
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From: Dorset
As Dick has stated, this question concerns Earth Rate drift. If you are not familiar with it, a brief summary is provided below.

Because of its property of rigidity, a spinning gyroscope remains aligned with a fixed point in space. If a gyroscope is placed upon the earth it will initially be aligned with both a point in space and a point on the earth. This might for example be the North Pole. As the earth rotates it carries the gyroscope with it. The gyroscope will remain aligned with the same point in space but this will no longer be aligned with the same point on the earth. This phenomenon is called earth rate error or apparent drift.

The magnitude of earth rate drift is proportional to the latitude

In the northern hemispheres this drift is to the right. In the southern hemisphere this drift is to the left.

To visualise this, imagine that you are looking down on a gyro that is lying horizontally at the North Pole. The Earth spins anti-clockwise to the East while the gyro spin axis remains unchanged. So relative to the Earth, the gyro spin axis appears to be rotating clockwise to the right.

The JAR CQB has two very similar questions on this subject. For one the correct anser is "It causes the gyro to spin to the left in the southern hemisphere". In the second the correct answer is "It causes the gyro to spin to the right in the northern hemisphere".
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