Scientists have successfully try out a 400 - year - old possibility in orbit , confirming the comparison principle tested by Galileo Galilei in the 16th hundred .
As report inScience , the experimentation choose place about 700 klick ( 440 miles ) above Earth ’s surface , on board a Gallic artificial satellite called MICROSCOPE ( Micro - Satellite à traînée Compensée swarm l’Observation du Principe d’Equivalence ) .
The orbiter was launched on April 25 , 2016 , with the goal of testing the par principle . This is the idea , later make upon in Einstein ’s hypothesis of general theory of relativity , that aim of dissimilar mess are accelerate at the same speed by gravity , irrespective of their mass .
The experiment was splendidly tested on board theApollo 15 mission in 1971 , when astronaut Dave Scott dropped a plume and a cock on the Moon . In the absence seizure of aura , and thus zephyr electric resistance , both hit the ground simultaneously .
The $ 240 million MICROSCOPE experimentation was a bit different . lead by the French blank space authority CNES , it involved usingtwo cylindrical masseseach a few centimeters long . The planet uses thrusters to flee around the piston chamber , preclude them from touching the slope . Something like was use on an ESA mission calledLISA Pathfinder .
In doing the experiment , the team made indisputable to polish off all other force that could be acting on the cylinder . These include things like aerodynamic forces from the outer reaches of the ambiance and encroachment from solar photons .
The cylinder were kept in constant costless fall while orbiting Earth , keep in post inside the satellite by applying small voltages . As the satellite orbited Earth every 1.5 time of day , a difference in the voltage applied to each would designate that they were falling at unlike speeds . After 1,500 ambit , however , there was no such difference .
“ The mission appears to have performed fantastically , ” Clifford Will , a theoretic physicist at the University of Florida in Gainesville , told Science . A newspaper describing the findings is to be published in Physical Review Letters .
The team now plans to perform the experimentation on another 900 orbits , further refining their resultant role so far . At the second , no deviation in speedup was discover to be about one part in 100 trillion , or 1014 , over 10 times better than anything we can do on Earth . They desire to improve this to 1015with the subsequent orbits .
