What should we do in space? NASA has bet the farm on the International Space Station, a giant orbiting Lego set where astronauts can play Mommies and Daddies, practice sharing and become zero-g toilet trained. Almost everyone else wants to do something useful.
So a bunch of chief eggheads from the world of physics have drawn up a wishlist of space missions to look for new physics and test the old stuff to breaking point. Here’s a few of the gems:
SpaceTime: a mission to fly atomic clocks in a highly elliptical orbit around the Sun to see if the fine structure (or other fundamental) constant varies. Could also test the Equivalence principle
Inverse Square Law Experiment in Space (ISLES) does what it say on the tin by bouncing laser beams off the Moon and Mars to test whether gravity really follows an inverse square law at large distances
The Laser Astrometric Test of Relativity (LATOR) would use laser interferometry to measure the non-Euclidean geometry of giant light triangle around the Sun. The mission would test whether the infamous evidence in favour of dark matter could be explained instead by a modified theory of gravity
LISA (the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) measures gravity waves using a constellation of laser interferometers
The Extreme Universe Space Observatory (EUSO) watches how a segment of the Earth’s atmopshere lights up when struck by ultra-high energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. Might also spot dark matter particles
Cold atom sensors in space could test the inverse square law at the scale of a few micrometers.
And so on…
If these sound like a physicist’s wet dream, yer probably right. But don’t write it off, there are some big cheeses behind this list, including Francis “Probe” Everitt (although the last spacecraft he built took 40 years to get into space ). They got the clout to get at least one of these things off the ground.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0711.0150: Space-based Research in Fundamental Physics and Quantum Technologies