Recent content by Polestar101

Thanks for the excerpt from Professor Wills (head of review board) who has looked at many of the efforts the team has gone through in trying to identify and separate the various unexpected sources of noise. His own work depends on Einstein’s GR, so it is not surprising that he would support the...

Is there a detailed analysis available that explains how they canceled out each of the 50 plus unwanted signals? I am particularly interested to learn how they canceled out the "unpredictable" polhode noise and other "unidentified" signals. Presumably there will be some follow-up report that...

Mauro – That is exactly the right question: what motion produced the noise signals? In order to isolate the geodetic effect and the very small GR effect, the GPB team needs to separate out a number of unwanted signals. The known ones are easy whereas the unknown ones are difficult to spot...

Interesting mental image. If there were an empty sphere 10 feet in diameter at the center of the Earth and a person was inside it, what would happen? Would that person be pulled in all directions towards the mass of the surrounding earth? Would they be pulled in the direction of the sun or moon...

Wish I shared your faith in the GP-B results. With so much unexpected noise (all of which needed to be properly accounted for and canceled out to have any chance of getting meaningful results) GP-B became more of an engineering project than a science experiment. Fortunately an objective panel of...

You can always blame it on polhode motion : )

No exo-solar object “stimulates axis precession” because there is no classical precession to produce. The observable of the stars moving across the sky at the rate of 30 degrees per 2000 years is simply the observable of a solar system in motion, just as the observable of the stars crossing the...

And this is the root of the problem. The earth’s wobble is indeed well known, measured and corrected for – so most scientists ‘assume’ that its theoretical cause (primarily lunisolar forces acting on the oblate earth) is a proven theory. Unfortunately, belief in a theory without questioning can...

You can't simply eliminate polhode and other perturbing forces to save the experiment without first being able to exactly quantify these effects. And to try and measure them by eliminating anything that does not get to the GR goal is circular reasoning and bad science.

Hi Mauro Garth is correct based on the prevailing assumptions – but you are correct that if those assumptions are not accurate then the angular velocity of the solar system could be much higher. This was the gist of a poster/paper on “Earth Orientation” that I presented in the Geodesy group...

As the SS curves through space the spacecraft , in orbit around the earth, must move with it. Just as GP-B will detect a change in orientation due to the spacecraft s orbit around the Earth (seen as a 97 minute wave), and due to the earth’s orbit around the sun (a longer waveform), so too...

If the solar system changes "orientation" we are not just talking parallax. VLBI does not account for changes in the solar system’s orientation to reference points outside the moving frame. Quote from NASA VLBI website: “Changes in the Earth’s orientation in inertial space have two causes: the...

If it is known - please tell me how it is known. The fact is the motion of the solar system is not known - it is assumed. The major assumption is that its only motion is around the galactic center in a period of about 240 million years resulting in a change in orientation of about .005" p/y...

It is certainly useful to exactly define the proper motion of the guide star but remember the reference point has nothing to do with the motion of the instrument that is doing the measuring. The spacecraft that is doing the measuring moves in its regular orbit, and it moves with the Earth in...

Garth – It is true that the steady signal from the ~5” aberration of light from the spacecraft ’s 91 minute orbit around the Earth served as a useful calibration tool. The less frequent ~20” aberration (due to the earth’s orbit around the sun) was hardly helpful at all because the periodicity...