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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 ...

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Figure 15-9. A poster on the effects of classical torques on the gyros to be presented at the APS meeting in April2007. You can view/download a larger and more readable PDF version of this posteron our <strong>GP</strong>-B APS Web page: http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/aps_posters#posters.Our weekly mission status updates from 19 August 2005 through 30 September 2005 provide a detailedchronicle of the final calibration tests that we performed until the liquid helium in the dewar was finallyexhausted. In particular, the Mission News Story dated 26 August 2005 discusses the method and purpose ofpost-science calibration tests.15.4.4 Patch Effects—The Underlying Cause of Both EffectsPerhaps the greatest and most important challenge embraced by <strong>GP</strong>-B team during the data analysis period hasbeen to determine the underlying causes of both the unexpectedly changing polhode paths in the <strong>GP</strong>-B gyrosand the misalignment torques. Data collected during the mission clearly shows that the polhode periods of allfour gyros did not remain constant, but rather they damped out in all four gyros. In addition, the data also showsthat the characteristic spin-down times of the gyros (the time it takes them to spin down to about 37% of theirinitial speed) varied from gyro to gyro, ranging from between 7,000 and 26,000 years. This result is far betterthan the experimental specification of 2,000 years, but it was less than initial expectations (on the order of 50,000years). More importantly, the wide variation in spin-down rates suggests that some mechanism inherent to eachindividual gyro might best account for the changing polhode paths and the misalignment torques on the gyros.But what kind of mechanism could this be?434 March 2007 Chapter 15 — Preliminary Results

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