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by i_think_so
57 days ago
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Gravity experiments? Easier to do accurately in lower gravity environments, like away from the Earth? And we just so happen to have a nearly permanent laboratory in orbit, which was built and is maintained at tremendous taxpayer expense? I thought this would be obvious from TFA. I should have been more explicit. |
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Resources are finite, and even though they're not fungible, which current ISS experiment would you replace for this?
Also: https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.062003 >>> LISA Pathfinder (LPF) [10] was a drag-free interfer- ometer located at the first Lagrange point in space be- tween the Earth and Sun. It measured the differential acceleration between two gold-platinum test masses sus- pended in drag free control. By the end of its lifetime, it had surpassed both its requirements and those of its full scale model LISA [11]. Given the success of the mission, and in coordination with other system tests, a handful of days near the end of the mission extension were allocated to performing a dedicated big G experiment for the first time in space. However, because Pathfinder was not de- signed to perform this sort of measurement, it was known that systematics such as absolute distances would limit the results to no better than 1 % relative uncertainty.