A NASA mission costing $600 million, which aimed to be the first to measure an esoteric prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, has been pipped to the post by a pair of scientists on a shoestring budget.
Einstein’s famous theory says that a massive rotating body should drag space-time around with it. The phenomenon – known as the Lense-Thirring effect – would cause the axis of spin of a gyroscope orbiting the Earth to go out of alignment by an angle of about 42 milli-arcseconds per year, equivalent to the width of a human hair seen from a kilometre away. To test for this effect,…
