GP-B Post-Flight Analysis—Final Report - Gravity Probe B - Stanford ...

Near Zero: New Frontiers of Physics J. D. Fairbank et al., Editors. New York, W. H. Freeman and Company,1988, pp. 587-608.From the preface: [Near Zero is] a book detailing the work of a group of physicists associated with WilliamFaribank who explored the regions of physics opened up by making one or more of the variables of physics verynearly zero. The idea of the book was conceived in August 1981 during the 16th International Conference onLow Temperature Physics, at which time about twenty people, mostly former students and associates ofFaribank, met to plan a scientific conference to honor him on the occasion of his 65th birthday....The conference was held at Stanford in March 1982, with nearly 150 participants. This book, which includes anentire chapter on GP-B, was one of the outcomes of this conference.Gravity Probe B: Countdown to Launch by C.W.F. Everitt, S. Buchman, D.B. DeBra, G.M. Keiser, J.M.Lockhart, B. Muhlfelder, B.W. Parkinson, J.P. Turneaure and other members of the Gravity Probe B team.Included in Gyros, Clocks, Interferometers...:Testing Relativistic Gravity in Space (Lecture Notes in Physics),Edited by C. Lammerzahl, C.W.F. Everitt, F.W. Hehl, Springer, 2000, pp. 52-82.This paper provides a summary of the history of GP-B and a detailed progress report on the development andtesting of Probe C, as of spring 2000. An Adobe Acrobat PDF copy of this paper is available for downloadingfrom our GP-B Web server at: http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/sci_papers/papers/Everitt_et_al-Cntdwnlaunch-2000.pdfGravity Probe B: A Management Study A report to NASA by Edward S.Calder and Bradley T. Jones, April 21,2006.Because some aspects of GP-B program management were unique among NASA programs, and because GP-Bwas viewed as a management experiment as well as a scientific experiment, in 2005, NASA Headquarterscommissioned two former GP-B team members, Ned Calder from the Engineering Systems Division at MITand Brad Jones, from the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department at Stanford University to research andprepare an independent study on the management of GP-B. In the spring of 2006, Calder and Jones presentedtheir finished report to NASA. An Adobe Acrobat PDF copy of the complete Calder-Jones GP-B ManagementStudy Report is available for downloading from the GP-B Web server at:http://einstein.stanford.edu/pao/pfar/cj_report-apr2006.pdf.Some of the information in this chapter—especially in the latter sections—was drawn, in part, uponobservations from this report, and a few excerpts from the report have been quoted directly. (The quotedexcerpts have been identified accordingly.) In addition, a summary of lessons learned from the GP-Bmanagement experiment, as described in the Calder-Jones report, is included in Section 16.3, ManagementLessons from the Calder-Jones Report.Personal Conversations In the process of writing this chapter, all of the following people were interviewed: BillBencze, Sasha Buchman, Robert Cannon, Daniel DeBra, Francis Everitt, Gaylord Green, David Hipkins, TomLangenstein, Barry Muhlfelder, Bradford Parkinson, Mike Taber, and John Turneaure.Gravity Probe B — Post Flight Analysis • Final Report March 2007 167