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 (Will, 2014), 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 (McNutt et al., 2022) 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 g and the mass of the graviton via the Compton wavelength kC , 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 high- lighted as key strategies for obtaining high-quality estimates. In the most favourable scenario, g can be constrained to less than 1:5  105 , reducing the uncertainty obtained via Lunar Laser Ranging (Hofmann and Mu¨ ller, 2018), and a lower bound of 1:4  1014 km is set for kC , improving the estimates obtained from planetary ephemerides (Bernus et al., 2020) and gravitational wave detection (Abbott et al., Jun 2021). 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 / Plumaris, Michael; DE MARCHI, Fabrizio; Cascioli, Gael; Iess, Luciano. - In: ADVANCES IN SPACE RESEARCH. - ISSN 0273-1177. - 73:5(2024), pp. 2763-2773. [10.1016/j.asr.2023.11.053]

Testing theories of gravitation with the interstellar probe radio experiment

Michael Plumaris
;
Fabrizio De Marchi;Gael Cascioli;Luciano Iess
2024

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 (Will, 2014), 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 (McNutt et al., 2022) 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 g and the mass of the graviton via the Compton wavelength kC , 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 high- lighted as key strategies for obtaining high-quality estimates. In the most favourable scenario, g can be constrained to less than 1:5  105 , reducing the uncertainty obtained via Lunar Laser Ranging (Hofmann and Mu¨ ller, 2018), and a lower bound of 1:4  1014 km is set for kC , improving the estimates obtained from planetary ephemerides (Bernus et al., 2020) and gravitational wave detection (Abbott et al., Jun 2021). 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.
2024
radio science; general relativity; pn ranging; interstellar probe; post newtonian parameters
01 Pubblicazione su rivista::01a Articolo in rivista
Testing theories of gravitation with the interstellar probe radio experiment / Plumaris, Michael; DE MARCHI, Fabrizio; Cascioli, Gael; Iess, Luciano. - In: ADVANCES IN SPACE RESEARCH. - ISSN 0273-1177. - 73:5(2024), pp. 2763-2773. [10.1016/j.asr.2023.11.053]
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11573/1696369
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