Abstract General Relativity (GR) will soon celebrate its 110th birthday, holding up against all experimental enquiry. Nonetheless, unification theories attempting to quantize gravity, such as string theory, are gaining footing. These hypothesize additional scalar, vector, and tensor long-range fields that couple to matter (), introducing violations to GR. Although such violations have never been detected, it is likely that GR will not be the ultimate theory of gravity. What is certain is that gravity tests are alive and well, pushing the validity of GR to new scales and accuracies, or -potentially- suggesting alternative routes for new physics. Building upon the legacy of Voyager and Pioneer missions, which demonstrated the capability to survive in the outer reaches of the solar system, the Interstellar Probe mission concept () aims to characterise our heliosphere through state-of-the-art instrumentation, opening new frontiers also for GR testing. In this work, we investigate the possibility of constraining the Nordtvedt parameter and the mass of the graviton via the Compton wavelength , by simulating the processing of 10 years of radiometric data from the Interstellar Probe. Station calibration and clock synchronisation, as well as limiting spacecraft precession manoeuvres are highlighted as key strategies for obtaining high-quality estimates. In the most favourable scenario, can be constrained to less than , reducing the uncertainty obtained via Lunar Laser Ranging (), and a lower bound of km is set for , improving the estimates obtained from planetary ephemerides () and gravitational wave detection (). Extending ranging measurement acquisition to 20 years improves the results tenfold. This experiment interrogates fundamental physics from a unique dynamical setting, investigating possible violations of the Equivalence Principle (EP) underlying GR.
Testing theories of gravitation with the Interstellar Probe Radio Experiment
Advances in Space Research ; 73 , 5 ; 2763-2773
2023-11-30
11 pages
Aufsatz (Zeitschrift)
Elektronische Ressource
Englisch
Elsevier | 2010
|Online Contents | 2011
|Metrology for AGP — Astrometric Gravitation Probe
IEEE | 2015
|NASA's Interstellar Probe Mission
NTRS | 2000
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