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

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

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

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Figure 15-8. A slide from the <strong>GP</strong>-B plenary talk that Francis Everitt will deliver at the APS meeting on April 14,2007. This slide shows how dither and aberration of starlight are used as calibrating signals in determining thegyro-telescope scale factor, C g .Fortunately, the <strong>GP</strong>-B experimental data includes natural calibrating signals in the form of the aberration ofstarlight—both orbital and annual. (For a discussion of how the aberration of starlight is used as calibratingsignal in the <strong>GP</strong>-B data, see Section 14.1.5, Aberration of Starlight—Nature’s Calibrating Signal.) Our goal is toperform this calibration to a precision of 1 part in 100,000 (0.001 percent), but our measurements are limited bythe noise in our SQUID readout system. If there were no variation in the polhode period of the gyros, we couldsimply string together the data taken during the Guide Star Valid (GSV) portion of each orbit (when thespacecraft has a direct line of sight to the Guide Star) from a sequence of orbits until we have reached the desired0.001 percent precision. (We must string together data from ~15 orbits to reach this level of precision.) However,the polhode periods for the gyros did vary over the data collection period, and this makes it much more difficultto connect the data from successive orbits.432 March 2007 Chapter 15 — Preliminary Results

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