TL-DR: Multiple spacecraft arranged in a tetrahedral flying formation with inter-spacecraft alignment controlled closely enough to infer two different effects when the spacecraft alignment does change.

chaoticalHeavy

science

Tetrahedral configurations of spacecraft on unperturbed heliocentric orbits allow for highly precise observations of small spatial changes in the gravitational field, especially those affecting the gravity gradient tensor (GGT). The resulting high sensitivity may be used to search for new physics that could manifest itself via deviations from general relativistic behavior yielding a non-vanishing trace of the GGT. 