Gravity Probe B: Relatively Important?

Gravity Probe B: Relatively Important?

You may have read Wednesday's news: Albert Einstein, Timemagazine’s “Man of the Twentieth Century,” indeed did not goof up when he put forth the theory of general relativity.

Artist’s concept of the geodetic effect — Earth producing a dent in the spacetime fabric due to its gravity. (To understand such illustrations click here.)

NASA

NASA’s $750 million satellite Gravity Probe B proved that time and space do curve near massive objects like Earth, and also that space and time are dragged along a tiny trace by Earth’s rotation.
But wait a minute! Didn’t we already know this? To high precision?
The truth is, we did. The LAGEOS satellites, lunar ranging, the Cassini mission’s radio experiment, and binary pulsars, to name just a few, have all verified general relativity — including these two particular predictions — sometimes to much higher accuracy than Gravity Probe B (Sky & Telescope, July 2005 issue, page 33).
At least Gravity Probe B will go down in history for being the only experiment to prove Einstein right in one particular way so close his home planet.