Mon, Apr 05, 2004
NASA Orbital Experiment To Test Einstein's Theory
When Gravity Probe B was first proposed by NASA, Dwight D.
Eisenhower was president. Cuba was still considered a friendly
country and Vietnam was a place few Americans could point to on a
map. Manned space flight was still an unrealized dream.
Now, 45-years later, Gravity Probe B is finally being prepared
for lift-off at Vandenberg AFB (CA). It's mission: test two
linchpin theories first proposed by Albert Einstein. In 1916,
Einstein figured a planet like Earth could actually mold and twist
the fabric of space and time. Think of a lead weight resting in the
middle of a soft mattress and you'll get an idea of what he had in
mind. That very effect, he proposed, is directly responsible for
gravity.
Since 1959, the probe has survived -- barely, in some cases --
cancellation, technical problems and launch delays. But April 17th,
Gravity Probe B will finally launch.
The probe is built around four perfectly spherical balls, about
the size of ping-pong balls. They're made of quartz and touted as
the most perfect spheres ever created by man. They're packed in
vacuum thermoses and cooled to near absolute zero.
Here's how Stanford University puts it: "The experiment will
check, very precisely, tiny changes in the direction of spin of
four gyroscopes contained in an Earth satellite orbiting at
400-mile altitude directly over the poles. So free are the
gyroscopes from disturbance that they will provide an almost
perfect space-time reference system. They will measure how space
and time are warped by the presence of the Earth, and, more
profoundly, how the Earth's rotation drags space-time around with
it. These effects, though small for the Earth, have far-reaching
implications for the nature of matter and the structure of the
Universe.
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