http://www.physorg.com/news95953845.html

Was Einstein right? Scientists provide first public peek at Gravity Probe B
results

By Bob Kahn

Gravity Probe B measured two effects predicted by Einstein's general theory
of relativity. The geodetic effect says the Earth's mass warps local time
and space like the weight of a bowling ball placed on a rubber sheet would
dent the sheet. The frame-dragging effect posits that the rotating Earth
drags time and space around with it like a spinning dancer's body causes her
skirt to swirl. Source: Stanford University

For the past three years a satellite has circled the Earth, collecting data
to determine whether two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of
relativity are correct. Saturday, at the American Physical Society meeting
in Jacksonville, Fla., Professor Francis Everitt, a Stanford University
physicist and principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B (GP-B)
Relativity Mission, a collaboration of Stanford, NASA and Lockheed Martin,
provided the first public peek at data that will reveal whether Einstein's
theory has been confirmed by the most sophisticated orbiting laboratory ever
created.
"Gravity Probe B has been a great scientific adventure for all of us, and we
are grateful to NASA for its long history of support," Everitt said. "My
colleagues and I [presented] the first results [Saturday, April 14] and
[Sunday, April 15]. It's fascinating to be able to watch the Einstein
warping of space-time directly in the tilting of these GP-B gyroscopes-more
than a million times better than the best inertial navigation gyroscopes."

The GP-B satellite was launched in April 2004. It collected more than a
year's worth of data that the Stanford GP-B science team has been poring
over for the past 18 months. The satellite was designed as a pristine,
space-borne laboratory, whose sole task was to use four ultra-precise
gyroscopes to measure directly two effects predicted by general relativity.
One is the geodetic effect-the amount by which the mass of the Earth warps
the local space-time in which it resides. The other effect, called
frame-dragging, is the amount by which the rotating Earth drags local
space-time around with it. According to Einstein's theory, over the course
of a year, the geodetic warping of Earth's local space-time causes the spin
axes of each gyroscope to shift from its initial alignment by a minuscule
angle of 6.606 arc-seconds (0.0018 degrees) in the plane of the spacecraft's
orbit. Likewise, the twisting of Earth's local space-time causes the spin
axis to shift by an even smaller angle of 0.039 arc-seconds (0.000011
degrees)-about the width of a human hair viewed from a quarter mile away-in
the plane of the Earth's equator.

      With its telescope aimed at IM Pegasi, a far-off guide star serving as
a fixed reference point, the experiment measured tiny changes in the
direction of spin of four gyroscopes. Credit: Stanford University

GP-B scientists expect to announce the final results of the experiment in
December 2007, following eight months of further data analysis and
refinement. Today, Everitt and his team are poised to share what they have
found so far-namely that the data from the GP-B gyroscopes clearly confirm
Einstein's predicted geodetic effect to a precision of better than 1
percent. However, the frame-dragging effect is 170 times smaller than the
geodetic effect, and Stanford scientists are still extracting its signature
from the spacecraft data. The GP-B instrument has ample resolution to
measure the frame-dragging effect precisely, but the team has discovered
small torque and sensor effects that must be accurately modeled and removed
from the result.

"We anticipate that it will take about eight more months of detailed data
analysis to realize the full accuracy of the instrument and to reduce the
measurement uncertainty from the 0.1 to 0.05 arc-seconds per year that we've
achieved to date down to the expected final accuracy of better than 0.005
arc-seconds per year," said William Bencze, GP-B program manager.
"Understanding the details of this science data is a bit like an
archeological dig. A scientist starts with a bulldozer, follows with a
shovel, and then finally uses dental picks and toothbrushes to clear the
dust away from the treasure. We are passing out the toothbrushes now."

The two discoveries

Two important discoveries were made while analyzing the gyroscope data from
the spacecraft: one, the "polhode" motion of the gyroscopes dampens over
time; two, the spin axes of the gyroscopes were affected by small classical
torques. Both of these discoveries are symptoms of a single underlying
cause: electrostatic patches on the surface of the rotor and housing. Patch
effects in metal surfaces are well known in physics and were carefully
studied by the GP-B team during the design of the experiment to limit their
effects. Though previously understood to be microscopic surface phenomena
that would average to zero, the GP-B rotors show patches of sufficient size
to measurably affect the gyroscopes' spins.

The gyroscope's polhode motion is akin to the common "wobble" seen on a
poorly thrown American football, though it shows up in a much different form
for the ultra-spherical GP-B gyroscopes. While it was expected that this
wobble would exhibit a constant pattern over the mission, it was found to
slowly change due to minute energy dissipation from interactions of the
rotor and housing electrostatic patches. The polhode wobble complicates the
measurement of the relativity effects by putting a time-varying wobble
signal into the data.

The electrostatic patches also cause small torques on the gyroscopes,
particularly when the space vehicle axis of symmetry is not aligned with the
gyroscope spin axes. Torques cause the spin axes of the gyroscopes to change
orientation, and in certain circumstances, this effect can look like the
relativity signal GP-B measures. Fortunately, the drifts due to these
torques have a precise geometrical relationship to the misalignment of the
gyro spin/vehicle symmetry axis and can be removed from the data without
directly affecting the relativity measurement.

Both of these discoveries first had to be investigated, precisely modeled
and carefully checked against the experimental data before they could be
removed as sources of error. These additional investigations have added more
than a year to the data analysis, and this work is still in process. To
date, the team has made very good progress in this regard, according to its
independent Science Advisory Committee, chaired by relativistic physicist
Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., that has been
monitoring every aspect of GP-B for the past decade.

In addition to providing a first peek at the experimental results at the APS
meeting, the GP-B team has released an archive of the raw experimental data.
The data will be available through the National Space Sciences Data Center
at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center beginning in June.

Conceived by Stanford Professors Leonard Schiff, William Fairbank and Robert
Cannon in 1959 and funded by NASA in 1964, GP-B is the longest running,
continuous physics research program at both Stanford and NASA. While the
experiment is simple in concept-it utilizes a star, a telescope and a
spinning sphere-it took more than four decades and $760 million to design
and produce all the cutting-edge technologies necessary to bring the GP-B
satellite to the launch pad, carry out this "simple" experiment and analyze
the data. On April 20, 2004, GP-B made history with a perfect launch from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. After a four-month initialization
and on-orbit check-out period, during which the four gyroscopes were spun up
to an average of 4,000 rpm and the spacecraft and gyro spin axes were
aligned with the guide star, IM Pegasi, the experiment commenced. For 50
weeks, from August 2004 to August 2005, the spacecraft transmitted more than
a terabyte of experimental data to the GP-B Mission Operations Center at
Stanford. One of the most sophisticated satellites ever launched, the GP-B
spacecraft performed magnificently throughout this period, as did the GP-B
Mission Operations team, comprised of scientists and engineers from
Stanford, NASA and Lockheed Martin, said Stanford Professor Emeritus
Bradford Parkinson, a co-principal investigator with John Turneaure and
Daniel DeBra, also emeritus professors at Stanford. The data collection
ended on Sept. 29, 2005, when the helium in spacecraft's dewar was finally
exhausted. At that time, the GP-B team transitioned from mission operations
to data analysis.

Over its 47-year lifetime, GP-B has advanced the frontiers of knowledge,
provided a training ground for 79 doctoral students at Stanford (and 13 at
other universities), 15 master's-degree students, hundreds of undergraduates
and dozens of high school students who worked on the project. In addition,
GP-B spawned more than a dozen new technologies, including the
record-setting gyroscopes and gyro suspension system, the SQUID (for
Superconducting QUantum Interference Device) gyro readout system, the
ultra-precise star-pointing telescope, the cryogenic dewar and porous plug,
the micro-thrusters and drag-free technology, and the Global Positioning
System-based orbit determination system. All of these technologies were
essential for carrying out the experiment, but none existed in 1959 when the
experiment was conceived. Furthermore, some technologies that were designed
at Stanford for use in GP-B, such as the porous plug that controlled the
escape of helium gas from the dewar, enabled and were used in other NASA
experiments such as COBE (the COsmic Background Explorer, which won this
year's Nobel prize) WMAP (for Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) and the
Spitzer Space Telescope.

The experiment's final result is expected upon completion of the data
analysis this December. Asked for his final comment, Everitt said: "Always
be suspicious of the news you want to hear."

Source: Stanford University

-- 

Ken

"Buddhism elucidates why we are sentient."
"Buddhism follows thought throughout the Universe."
"Karma means that you don't get away with anything."