Albert Einstein's Relativity Theory Has Been Proven By Mislaunched Satellites

Parvati Divakar - Dec 13, 2018

The two satellites launched by Europe were placed in the wrong orbits turned out to be a huge discovery.

Albert Einstein announced the Theory of general relativity in 1915. However, this idea is still regarded as a theory because there haven't been any ways to verify the authenticity of this theory at that time.

But those days are gone, now thanks to the advance of science, the scientists have been able to confirm Albert's theory thanks to a mistaken launch of satellites.

With an aim to establish the GPS (global positioning system) network of their own, the European Union made plans to form the GNSS system (global navigation satellite system) by launching 30 satellites into the Galileo constellation a couple of years ago. Nonetheless, things did not go according to the plan when two satellites did not reach their intended orbital position.

In the 2014 launch, the navigation system required the Galileo five and six to be placed in a location with low eccentricities to have circular orbits. But both of them were not on the right track and settled into an elliptical orbit instead of a circular one.

However, the failure doesn't mean that they have wasted time and effort to make meaningless things. Scientists have reused the two satellites for a further study of the general relativity theory of Einstein.

Einstein showed in his theory that gravity impacts on both space and time. In a more easily understanding way, time will go more slowly if you stay nearer to the gravitational field. Because of their elliptical orbits, the Galileo five and six rise to the height of 8,500 km above the surface of the Earth and fall back twice a day. The European Space Agency realized this is such a perfect situation for measuring how the passage of time corresponds to that on Earth.

Researchers have used Galileo's atomic clocks to figure out the effects of height by measuring of the period of time when it to be either slow or fast. The experimental results confirmed that Einstein's theory is absolutely correct, the clocks showed that time sped up and slowed down only in a few thousandths of seconds. Moreover, in comparison with the previous gold standard measurement, the results obtained under the new experimental conditions were also judged to be five times more accurate.