orsayman - Slashdot User

Submission + - Final results of the MICROSCOPE mission confirms Einstein's equivalence principe

Submitted by orsayman on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @05:34PM

orsayman writes: Remember the MICROSCOPE satellite ? In 2017, based on its first results, scientists were able to confirm Einstein's equivalence principle (a key assumption in General Relativity) to unprecedented precision.

Recently, they were able to improve precision by almost another order of magnitude by using all the data. Fortunately (or not) no violation of the principle was detected which could help physicists to improve their theories of quantum gravity.

Apparently the team expects to send a new mission “in the second half of the 2030s” aiming for another huge improvement in precision.

Submission + - A new test of the Equivalence Principle

Submitted by orsayman on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @01:18PM

orsayman writes: Most stories around space today seem to revolve around SpaceX but let's not forget that space is also a place for cool physics experiments. One such experiment currently running into low orbit is the MICROSCOPE satellite launched in 2016 to test the (weak) Equivalence Principle (also knows as the universality of free fall) a central hypothesis in General Relativity.

The first results confirm the principle with a precision ten times better than previous experiments. And it's just the beginning since they hope to increase the precision by another factor of 10. If the Equivalence Principle is still verified at this precision, this could constrain or invalidate some quantum gravity theories.

For those of you who are more satellite-science oriented, the satellite also features an innovative "self destruct" mechanism (meant to limit orbit pollution) based on inflatable structures described in this paper (paywalled).

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