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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 8: Experimentelle Tests 1

GR 8.2: Hauptvortrag

Mittwoch, 15. März 2017, 09:10–09:50, SFG 0140

MICROSCOPE: The first space-based test of the Weak Equivalence Principle in orbit — •Stefanie Bremer¹, Meike List¹, Benny Rievers¹, Hanns Selig¹, and Manuel Rodrigues² — ¹ZARM, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany — ²ONERA, The French Aerospace Lab, Palaiseau, France

After more than 15 years of planning, developing, building, and testing, MICROSCOPE has finally been launched in April 2016. After the commissioning phase, scientific measurements started in December and are planned to be continued at least for 18 month. The goal of this satellite mission is ambitious: The Weak Equivalence Principle is being tested with a precision never achieved before yielding the determination of the Eötvös parameter η with an accuracy of 10⁻¹⁵.

Developed, built and now operated by the French space agency CNES, MICROSCOPE is the first satellite in a low Earth orbit using a drag-free attitude control system. This technology forms the foundation for the scientific payload T-SAGE, developed and built by ONERA. The payload comprises two differential accelerometers, each containing two test masses. Due to the drag-free system non-gravitational disturbances are cancelled out thus allowing the test masses to follow a pure gravitational orbit. The accurate analysis of the test mass motion will finally result in a quantity of η.

First scientific results are expected in June 2017. This talk will summarize MICROSCOPE’s road to space and highlight some features of the challenging data analysis procedure.