Software Question Delays Launch Of Gravity B Probe

Einstein was right. Gravity works. NASA's Gravity Probe B is still stuck firmly to terra firma.

Well, it wasn't all Einstein's fault. Seems the probe, one of the most precise scientific instruments ever designed, didn't launch Monday because someone forgot to load high altitude wind data aboard the launch vehicle. Or maybe they did. The point is, nobody knows. With time running short on a critical one-second launch window, NASA engineers decided they'd rather be safe than sorry.

"Once you get inside four minutes and you're headed to T-0, if you have a problem you don't have time to discuss it. With a one-second window there was no opportunity to try to resolve this," said NASA's George Diller.

The next window occurs at 12:57 pm Tuesday.

Once aloft, Gravity Probe B will spend two months in a polar orbit, calibrating its sensitive equipment, before spending the next 16 months measuring whether the Earth actually warps time and space, sort of like an aircraft warps the air behind it into vortexes.

That follows one of Albert Einstein's more exotic theories: massive bodies moving through orbit create a vortex of their own in time and space. In short, a small bit of both are missing from each orbit. An astronaut in space wouldn't notice it without instrumentation, but Einstein says it happens nonetheless.

FMI: www.einstein.stanford.edu