My dad is a thermal dynamics engineer at Lockheed Martin. He helped design the Dewar for the payload. The Dewar is a giant thermos containing enough liquid helium to keep the satellite's sensitive instruments cooled to below 4 degrees kelvin for the duration of the experiment (1 year).<p><a href="http://einstein.stanford.edu/gallery/dewar/dewar_lift.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://einstein.stanford.edu/gallery/dewar/dewar_lift.jpg</a><p>The team had a bet going on how long the satellite would be able to record meaningful data while in orbit. He won the pool after guessing correctly to within +- 24 hours on the year-long mission. This is my dad on the left :<p><a href="http://einstein.stanford.edu/Library/images/He_dep-MOC-1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://einstein.stanford.edu/Library/images/He_dep-MOC-1.jpg</a><p>Like jmillikin says, the science team collected terabytes of data and ran over several deadlines to report their findings. The precision required for the experiment is really quite phenomenal. Measuring discrepancies in gyroscopic alignment to within the 4 marcsec/yr is not trivial.
Not a lot of context in this announcement.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame-dragging" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame-dragging</a>
Obtaining this result cost us about a billion dollars.<p>I'm as excited about confirmations of General Relativity as the next person, but when you think about the kinds of non-trivial planetary science or cosmology experiments you could fire into space on a billion-dollar budget, the decision to throw dollars at Gravity Probe B (not to mention the ISS...) is regrettable.
Can we have a title on this that indicates that it's physics, not tech, please? I wouldn't have clicked if I had known it was physics.<p>EDIT: um, I'm not commenting to complain that the post is on HN; I'm commenting to complain that the post is on HN with a title that makes it look like it might have to do with computers (e.g., windowing systems or frames in web browsers).