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For Release:
IMMEDIATE
Nicholas Panagakos
Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
(Phone: 202/755-3680)
Don Worrell
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
(Phone: 205/453-0035)
theory of relativity.
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theory.
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dicts that the red shift effect should be about seven parts
in 10 billion (7 x 1 10
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tion of the two prime clocks, SAO provided the control and
to MSFC.
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COMPONENTS OF EXPERIMENT
the "E section", a ring which adapts the fourth stage of the
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By Dr. R. F. C. Vessot
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Principal Investigator, GP-A
million (1014) have been developed and adapted for space. With recent
span the entire solar system- and use massive b6ders and large distances
moving with respect to one another, each containing rods ar.d clocks.
in fact, use rods and clocks. However, the rod lengths arc related to
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and the warping affects both the spatial and the temporal dimensions.
Our new "laboratory" has extended into space and may well be the
proportionality between gravitational and inertial mass that has een tested
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from the finite transit time between the transmitter and the receiver;
velocity, and the arriving wave crests will encounter the receiver
effect due to the velocity gained by the receiver during the transit time of
the signals. Our goal is to see if the signals will behave the same way when
gravity.
errors due to slow drifts in the clock rates, the clock should be
high and low altitudes and making the best use of the clocks' stabilities.
This suggests a space probe that attains a very great altitude and falls
back to Earth. Since the measurements near the Earth are as important
as those far from it, and because in such a trajectory the velocity near
the Earth is very high, not much time is available near Earth for making
that can deliver high stability over short time intervals. A further
hours. The total predicted red shift due to the Earth is about
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oscillator, we must learn to cope with very large Doppler shifts in the
the second-order shift at any given time, we will use data available to
us from our knowledge of the probe's trajectory and obtain the velocity
the Doppler shifts due to the probe's motion, there are also frequency
shifts due to changes in the electrical path through the Earth's atmosphere
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the frequency of the original signal from the Earth. The frequency
difference is twice the one-way Doppler shift associated with the probe
effects, and we are left with a signal whose frequency contains the
information we seek.
of the probe clock will appear to be retarded by about two cycles per
altitude and slows down, this effect diminishes and will be offset by the
gravitational shift, which makes the probe clock appear to run faster,
well did the experiment really work? " However, we expect the e-aperi-
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GP-A/SCOUT D PROGRAM/PROJECT MANAGEMENT
NASA Headquarters
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Contractors
8 .g9lt7 Jun
June~ 8, 1976
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