The small French satellite “Microscope” has reached a record accuracy in verifying the physical “equivalence principle”, which is one of the pillars of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, according to several studies whose results were presented on Wednesday.
This small satellite was launched in April of 2016 and settled at an altitude of 710 km above the Earth’s surface, providing information over a period of two and a half years.
The small satellite, built by the French National Center for Space Studies, contains two accelerometers belonging to the French Center for Space Research, which also handles data processing by means of simulation and data processing tools developed by the Côte d’Azur Observatory.
The famous scientist Galileo was the first to hypothesize in the seventeenth century that two bodies of different mass and composition collide with the Earth at the same time as they were dropped at the same time. Three centuries later, an astronaut from the “Apollo 15” mission was able to embody this theory by dropping a feather and a hammer on the surface of the moon at the same speed.
As for Newton, he assumed the “equivalence principle” between the force of gravity and the force of inertia that would affect the body if it was in an accelerating motion.
This principle is a pillar of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as a curvature of spacetime that deforms matter.
And in 2007, scientists came to prove the principle of parity between the two forces with a precision of 13 tenths, but space is the ideal environment to verify it more accurately by being free from various influences on the surface of the Earth.
As for the result, which was presented today, Wednesday, and includes studies published in the prestigious journals “Physical Review Letters” and “Classical Quantum Gravity”, it verifies the “equivalence principle” with an accuracy of 15 deciths.
And a “microscope”, using an accelerometer, compared the forces needed to keep two cylinders immobile if they were of different mass and composition and suspended in a small container that was released from the air and subjected to Earth’s gravity.
Verifying the principle of equivalence required verifying that the two forces are equal, and all this with accuracy “equivalent to measuring the weight of a fly on board a giant oil tanker weighing five million tons,” explained the director of experiments at the French Center for Space Research, Manuel Rodriguez, while presenting the results at the National Center for Studies in outer space.
The measurement implementation was based on a satellite control system that provides near-perfect stability, and on data processing that ensures the correction of the noisy signals.
Future projects such as Microscope 2 aim to improve the measurement further, to in-depth tests of one of the pillars of general relativity, and to test models aimed at unifying the theory of relativity with quantum theory.
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