By Andrew Grant
A grueling but ultimately successful effort to test Einstein’s 100-year-old general theory of relativity has come to a close more than half a century after it began. Twenty-one papers published online November 17 in Classical and Quantum Gravity present a detailed summation of Gravity Probe B, a satellite that in 2011 confirmed Einstein’s prediction that Earth dents and whips up the spacetime around it.
“It’s very exciting,” says principal investigator Francis Everitt of Stanford University. “It’s been quite exhausting.”