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NASA Gravity Probe Set for Launch
The Real Dr John writes "NASA announced
yesterday that its longest running program, Gravity Probe B, was ready and
scheduled for launch on April 17th. The project has taken 44 years to complete,
at a cost of approximately $700 million. The reason for the high cost is that
the probe contains the most sensitive gyroscopic equipment ever created, which
will be used to test Einstein's theory of gravity. Einstein predicted that the
gravity created by a large body warped space-time, but he also predicted that if
the large body was rotating it would create a drag effect on space-time
known as frame dragging. Gravity Probe B will be able to test
Einstein's theory using Earth's relatively small gravitational field because the
instruments are so sensitive."
Seems God plays roulette even if he doesn't play dice.
The slightest bit of interference could deem it unusable data with as much precision the gyroscopes will be operating. I have a feeling that even interference they are not thinking about (who am I kidding, this is nasa) such as solar radiation, and the magnetic north shift (which as of late, has been about 10 miles a year) will alter the results of this test dramaticly.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
large body was rotating it would create a drag effect on space-time known as frame dragging.
I think we're all familiar with time dialation (if you haven't read "The Elegent Universe", you're missing the best explanation of *why* time dislation occurs that I have ever heard), but what is frame dragging? What kind of effects does it have on the observer?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
More interestingly enough, what can we use this for? No, this isn't sarcasm, but how can we apply these scientific principals to help our daily lives and to understand the universe better?
Comments anyone?
So what happend to Gravity Probe A?
(sorry had to ask)
I really would like to see the result of this. Too bad that it took so much of the taxpayers money tho.
i viewed the elegant universe, the other day by brian green, and am currently reading the text, much has changed in theory over the last 44 years, string theory for one, currently holds the possiblility that gravtiy strings are looped and therefore capable of jumping from our current brane/dimension. will this allow and or test for this theory or is the device antiquated before deployment? I guess thats a risk involved with such a long dev cycle. hopefully it will take this into account, or has the CERN project already made this redundant?
Did I mention that my car is a Maybach 62, which costs $380,000? With an expensive car like that, you want to make sure the upholstery doesn't get dirty.
And in other Gravity Probe B News.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Einstein predicted that the gravity created by a large body warped space-time, but he also predicted that if the large body was rotating it would create a drag effect on space-time known as frame dragging.
AAagh! Mental images of my ex dancing! *SHUDDER!*
NASA announced yesterday that its longest running program, Wooden Block B, was ready and scheduled for dropping off the Empire State Building on April 17th. The project has taken 44 years to complete, at a cost of approximately $700 million. The reason for the high cost is that the probe contains the most expensive wood ever created, which will be used to test Newton's theory of gravity. Newton predicted that an attractive force known as 'gravity' will act between any two bodies. Wooden Block B will be able to test Newton's theory using Earth's gravitational field, and a very tall building.
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That project has been kicking around Stanford for decades. I saw that satellite under construction almost twenty years ago. It's basically a subsidy program for PhD students, not a satellite program. If that job had been outsourced to Hughes or Loral, it would have launched decades ago.
Why is ServBeach advertising that they run Debian? That's a sure-fire way to insure that they don't get any business.
If you look on the web site, you'll see they have already contributed to the technology sector. http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/spinoffs/tech nology.html
ok. and what does this have to do with GPB?
Pardon the ignorance but can somebody spell out what impact the findings of this probe will have Science in general?
The atom bomb didn't kill billions of people you splooge. It killed thousands of people who were hell bent on conquering the united states and stamping out capitalism. Good for the atomb bomb. If it hadn't been invented, we'd all be speaking Japanese and German.
And since Einstein is such a slouch, please enlighten us: What have you accomplished?
I thought the Lense-Thirring effect was already measured (abstract of the Science article here)... but it seems that GP-B is designed to do exactly that. I'm trying to RTFA anyway.
Wow. That gravity probe is pretty heavy stuff. I remember them discussing it in that movie 'The Incredible Lightness of Being'. Far out.
I found the following quote especially interesting:
Francis Everitt, the principal investigator of the project, said: "Aren't Einstein's theories all established and confirmed? After all it was 50 years ago that Einstein himself died and it's 100 years next year when he developed his first theory of relativity. Don't we already know it all? The answer is no."
I wonder what other theories that are generally accepted throughout the scientific community have not been completely tested and/or verified. And, quite frankly, I'm surprised that there isn't much more VC and grant money available to go and do research on stuff like this. Afterall, these projects are quite prestigious.
In addition to the sensitivity problem, I wonder if this could be an experiment whose time has passed.
In 1995, the GP-B was described as the "only experiment ever devised to test [the existence of frame-dragging]."
However, in 1997 NASA announced that it had successfully tested frame dragging. See also here.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Does anyone know what the results are of the pesky problems they were having with onboard instruments duplicating the very readings they were trying to measure?
I'm thinking this mission is going to have serious problems. Some of which they already know about, but are unable to correct in time before the launch.
Due to the momentum of politics no doubt.
Guess it will be a measure of mass in the end anyway. Just not the kind we should be getting for the price tag.
The atom bomb didn't kill billions of people you splooge. It killed thousands of people who were hell bent on conquering the united states and stamping out capitalism.
It killed thousands of people who were just living their lives in each of two cities. That may have been a good thing in helping to end a war but pretending that those people were hell bent on conquering or stamping out anything is the height of dishonesty.
so we test it on a tiny gravity well where the results will be almost hidden in the background noise, while we have a couple of really nice BIG gravity wells that are near by. Saturn and Juipiter would give us a better result and clearer answer.
See article
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
They should launch anti-gravity probes. Wouldn't even need rockets and save us taxpayers some bucks.
Table-ized A.I.
What does this have to do with the gravity probe?
i submitted this story, yet it was rejected...only to be posted as front-page news by michael...?
Mandarin. The "ruling-class" of China speak Mandarin - mostly because Mandarin is spoken in the Beijing region, and Cantonese is spoken ... I forget where in China. The Canton province, obviously, but I forget where that is. Hong Kong is also mostly Cantonese-speaking, and I believe there are other areas in China that speak Cantonese. Not sure, but I think Taiwan is also Cantonese.
This is why I turn my cell phone to silent instead of turning it off.
Every article I found about it on NASA ends with "For more information, visit http://einstein.stanford.edu/".
Someone setup an experiment about 10 years ago with 2 highly percise clocks one was set up on the top of a tall build and the other was set at the bottom...they ticked and stoped at the same exact and the clock on top of the building was very slightly behind the clock on the bottom...so I guess that should say something about his theory of relativaty.
China's space program is *extremely* on-topic because the chances are this project wouldn't have even been attempted had the Chinese not been making the very public progress they have lately. The only time NASA is lulled out of it's slumber to do actual groundbreaking scientific work is when there's a foreign rival (usually communist).
Not a troll, QED.
Interestingly, frame-dragging can be so intense outside of a rotating black hole, it can force an object to be dragged with the rotation of the hole. There is a region of space outside a rotating hole's event horizon called the "ergosphere", and if you are within it, you literally cannot remain stationary, no matter how hard you try to thrust and resist the frame dragging: you will inevitably be pulled around the black hole, at least slightly.
If you had bothered to read the article you would seen this project has been running for nearly 40 years.
This comment is offtopic and stolen from here. Bloody trolls!
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
Actually working in the civilian aviation I ahd Fluight Engineer swear to me that this is only a problem on OLDER model aircraft, but that the new boing and Airbus do not come with that problem or solved it (how ? Maybe they shield the instrument from the inside too).
Airlines still hold onto the "no cell phone inside" because this is far easier than differenciate old and new aircraft models, and I suppose this is far easier than convince insurance or the other passenger.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Ok, I've read all of the technical specifications of the mission. My impression is that there are just too many non-redundant systems which require extremely precise calibration for the success of the mission. It will take a miracle for this thing to succeed. Maybe it's an elaborate April Fool's joke?
Parent comment copied from here. Please mod accordingly. (YHL HAND)
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
Inefficent military bureaucracy? I don't know where you heard this from, but in the military if something needs to get done, it gets done.
The main problem with NASA is lack of funding. The military has a similar problem (think about how many people they employ and what they have to buy before you flame that), but they still change when a better system is invented.
Maybe if we got rid of welfare and medicare/medicaid we could fully fund NASA.
When the mensch find they can vote themselves bread and butter, they will vote themselves bread and butter until it has all run out and the coffers are empty.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I'd say that (Although AC is a dumbass, NOTHING has killed billions of people within even a decade's time [guessing]) those at Hiroshima, and I believe Nagasaki, were innocent. Those casualties were mostly civilian. Hate to admit it, but Ami's have done some terrorism as well.
(I reiterate: Not sure if Nagasaki was a civilian target)
I hate grammar Nazi's.
That mission is planned for the next time that you're driving on a dark country road. We'll discover some "frame dragging" for sure.
You are not alone. This guy used to picket outside our gate:
Fortunately, if he's right, we'll never know, because the phase transition will occur at the speed of light.
Talk about living off the government gravy train.
Many theories of gravity, even those disagreeing wildly with GR, have frame dragging. If there are no decent alternative hypotheses that make different predictions, is it really worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on conducting this experiment?
From the article :
Since the project was conceived by three scientists after a naked midday swim at Stanford University's pool, more than 1,000 people have worked on the satellite. Two of its founders are dead. More than 90 people have earned their doctorates working on the project.
Naked physicists... wow... with the current administration in charge, this project would have never been approved.
Very cool experiment (well worth the cash) however I think the LATOR relativity experiment would be much more interesting and scientifically useful.
And probably not much more expensive.
LATOR is capable of testing string theory, an exciting but so far merely theoretical development in high energy physics. LATOR also seems to be much more accurate, and less likely to receive interference.
I do hope that this experiment works out, however as other posters have mentioned, there only has to be one unexpected source of error to totally screw this up.
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Wow, how did you know that?
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This guys post is taken from another discussion and another Slashdot user. Verbatim.
He's a troll relegated to 0 karma land, and desperate for anyway out.
See UID's comment on his post: here
Don't let this guy walk off with 5 mod points for such a stupid trick.
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Finally we're the ones doing the probing!
but why were the super-precise quartz balls made in Germany ?
I'm still waiting to get my hands on Regenerator G-1.
... the project that ate Stanford.
:)
When I was a grad student there, we had a running joke that nobody could get an astrophysics degree without selling at least a piece of their soul to Francis Everett, the chief booster for this project.
I was there when a rogue group suggested that, in the intervening four decades, technology had advanced enough to do the frame-dragging experiment with a laser-coordinated satellite net for half the cost.
We also circulated the "fact" that the GP-B launch date slipped by about 1.05 days per day. A friend defined it as a new universal constant for project overruns...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
heh, I first read bucks as buckets!
Hmmm. When World War II broke out, the US had discovered that, while its tactics with torpedos were more or less sound, they came to naught -- because the actual torpedos had this nasty habit of breaking apart on impact, rather than (say) exploding. It took two years (and who knows how many lives) to get that problem fixed.
The general rule seems, to my reading of history, to be that the military tends to be effective but not necessarily cost-efficient. Or put another way: Throw enough money at any technological problem and it will be solved. People tend to be freer with the gobs of money if they think it's related to national security.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The 40 year timespan got me wondering--what is the longest software development project ever? (i.e. for a single project).
Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman explored that idea (among others) in this book. Quite well written too, IMHO.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
Exploding the Earth would guarantee Bush would not be re-elected so I'm really not that worried.
Seriously, though, I'm more worried that some cave dwelling foul-smelling individual will blow up an observatory in protest encouraging all the other cave-dwelling foul-smelling individuals to blow whatever it is they think is destroying the society they are not even members of.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Pray it doesn't blow up on the launch pad...
This doesn't test General Relativity anyway, in the sense that it doesn't rule out modifications to Einstein's equations, because it is only in the weak field regime. The pulsar spin down experiments have already pretty much made this satellite redundant. Only cosmology and black hole physics can really test GR.
The world is everything that is the case
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Will this be able to test any of the small deviations in reletivity predicted by some of the theories of Quantum gravity such as string theory?
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
read _The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction_, John Leslie, 1996. Discusses the likeliness of that possibility and many others. Unexpectedly, it gives a good feeling because it clarifys the issues.
On the other hand, one astrophysicist I know thinks gamma ray bursters are advanced civilizations which just made that mistake.
Astrophysicists are now pretty confident that at least one particular class of GRBs are due to hypernovae.
Important science is only of important to scientists and is less real to people on planet earth than important fashion statements etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Duke Nukem Forever was originally first described in a Bell Labs whitepaper personally written by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in early 1970, just over 34 years ago. The whitepaper said that Duke Nukem Forever would run on Bell Labs' new UNIX system, and would be available "sometime before the end of the year". Bell started taking orders the next week, and the historic first order for DNF, by the U.S. patent office, was placed on that day. Eight months later, despite not yet being finished, Duke Nukem Forever was proclaimed "Game of the Year" by the October issue of the Association for Computing Machinery quarterly journal.
Since then the game has changed publishers and target platform numerous times, and changed intended game engines a stunning 57 times. Of the original five-man development team, two are still on the project, one currently holds a senior managerial position at Intel, and two are since dead. In 1995 when the original UNIX intellectual property block was licensed from Novell to SCO, the Duke Nukem Forever project was split off and separately sold to a company called 3D Realms, who still oversees it and currently publically states that DNF will be available "when it's done".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
But when it came to real life, he made many major mistakes. Like not being able to travel faster than speed of light, speed of light being a constant, or theory of relativity.
The problem with the education is that it is authoritarian. Nobody who hopes to graduate would get away with disproving him. In fact everyone things this is crap because after all, it's not possible that ALL scientists could be wrong.
Unfortunately ALL scientists don't get to test his theories, nor are they very good at it either. Not because they are stupid either, but because of this authoritarian bull. You see a scientists cannot express certainty, he must include uncertainty, or he will NEVER get published.
At some point it went all astray, and standards were created with enough confusion as to ensure nobody could ever be really sure, to get accepted. Weird stuff.
Same with medical industry. A doctor who treats a medical problem with vitamins will loose his license to practice. Because the drug manufactures has a total hold on that field. Avarice is a dangerous thing... Just as blind trust in authoritarian teachings.
Meanwhile his theories has enough workability to be somewhat usable, in spite of ultimately being limiting factors.
will most definitely blow up on launch. Betchya a buck and a beer there will never be one bit of data returned from this boondoggle!
Can I buy one of these satellites on ThinkGeek?
"Simple words such as 'better' or 'faster' are best used by simpletons. Life [...] is more complicated." - TMC
Hubble has had a pretty good look at the spectra of supermassive black holes at the ceters of local galaxies. With a nice close look at those centers, there is turbulences, physical discontinuities in the acretion disks around the supermassive black holes, and the only good candidate for the phenomena is frame dragging...
I mean it'll be cool to see if the numbers and the phenomena match, but it's not like there's going to be wild surprise.
Genda
gravity works, or gravity doesn't work; and if it doesn't work nobody's gonna believe it."
(I stole this from my venerable research supervisor.)
So that frame dragging I see while playing, say UT2k3, with a LCD screen is caused by the Earth rotating? I can prove it exists..
Store with salt
Yep. At the start of World War II for the US, in December 1941, it was amongst the weakest military-wise in the world. By August, 1945, less than four years later, it had nuked Japan. Nuked. In 1945. Look at the cars in 1945. Some military dude said "Let's make a bomb" and they built it.
But it cost a few billion bucks. GDP-wise, it was probably the largest project in US history. But such a pretty cloud!
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
The earth doesn't like to be.....probed.
It won't bend over, it won't spread-em, and it doesn't care how sensitive those damn machines are.
I also want to know who's going to be up there pulling all of those strings on those gyros!
(There! I feel much better now! I know it's stupid! I can hear you groaning out there - but I just had to post it!)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
From the ESA website
LISA
LISA is an ESA-NASA mission involving three spacecraft flying approximately 5 million kilometres apart in an equilateral triangle formation. Together, they act as a Michelson interferometer to measure the distortion of space caused by passing gravitational waves. Lasers in each spacecraft will be used to measure minute changes in the separation distances of free-floating masses within each spacecraft.
The LISA mission is designed to search for and detect gravitational radiation from astronomical sources. In the process, LISA can test some of the fundamental tenets of the theory of gravitation.
The most predictable sources
The most predictable sources of gravitational waves are binary star systems in our galaxy. LISA's observations of these systems would be of interest both for fundamental physics and for astrophysics. The LISA design is such that both the amplitude and also the polarization of gravitational waves can be measured. If gravitational radiation from known binary systems is not detected, or is detected with amplitudes or polarizations not predicted by general relativity, then general relativity must be wrong. If the sources are detected then the polarization measurement reveals the angle of inclination of the orbit of the binary system. This is a crucial missing factor from many optical observations of these systems, and is necessary in order to infer the mass of the stars in the binary pair.
Why so much emphasis on Einstein's Theory all of a sudden??
SBD
His name caught my attention by making me laugh and say eww at the same time, so I noticed he had several long posts in the discussion (one claiming he was a pilot), so I checked his posting history. It didn' look legit so I searched around and found the dupes he used. Lessons for the day: Use a less catchy nickname and don't try and crapflood and then rip off posts to gain your karma back.
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
The US in possetion of a fleet of ill tempered gravity probes with fricken lasers.
For more information about NASA's Gravity Probe B, you also should read this article from TechNewsWorld. You'll find additional comments and photos from NASA on my blog.
OK, so I read you blog. I found it, frankly, uninforming. What, if any, additional information were you supposed to add with that one? All I am left with is an intense feeling you are trolling for more hits to your blog.
I thought I would put this out there.
Before one even worries about relativistic tests:
With the news that we may be in the middle of a, relatively fast, "dark matter" stream:
Why is there not a relativistic effect from gravity just as there is one from electric charge running by at a high speed?
We are just not used to the idea of a "matter" current.
Am I talking about the same thing as Einstein (one side of the moving earth being much farther away than the other and thus having much less gravo-"magnetic" effect) or have I come up with a "what if" that isn't so "what if" anymore?
Also on a side-bar why would "dark matter" remain outside billions of tiny singularities? Is there some unknown force in the universe that would stop "dark matter" from clumping together?
Copyright 2004/04/05 11:14EST Andrew Rice
Copying as a whole, or parts, allowed. However, author must be attributed.
As someone who works with spaceflight hardware daily, I want to know the packing details.
That is one heck of a sensitive instrument to put through a Delta launch! Although it might seem strange... I am most fascinated by the packing and vibration isolation technology.
The actual experiment is kinda cool too.
There is a relativistic gravitomagnetic effect from moving masses, akin to the relativistic magnetic effect from moving charges. Gravity Probe B will measure this effect due to the spinning Earth.
I don't know why you think that dark matter would form singularities; it's not dense enough. Dark matter does clump together to some extent -- it is thought that locally dense regions of dark matter contributed to the "seeding" of galaxies and galactic clusters -- but most dark matter is probably too light to clump together into a solid body. (Neutrinos don't clump together into bodies, either.)
Inflight broadband
So how can they do this when the navigation is so fragile?
You can always tell a pilot,
You just can't tell them much!
Putz!