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It reads: FOURTH TEST OF GENERAL RELATIVITY: PRELIMINARY RESULTS Irwin I. Shapiro, * Gordon H. Pettengill, Michael E. Ash, Melvin L. Stone, William B. Smith, Richard P. Ingalls, and Richard A. Brockelman Lincoln Laboratory,† Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lexington, Massachusetts (Received 11 March 1968) Several years ago it became evident that a new test of general relativity was technically feasi-ble.' The proposed experiment was designed to verify the prediction that the speed of propagation of a light ray decreases as it passes through a region of increasing gravitational potential. For a radar pulse transmitted from the earth and reflected by another planet, the increase in the round-trip time delay, attributable to the predicted gravitational influence of the sun on the propagation, would be ~200 µsec if the path of the pulse were to graze the solar limb.

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It reads: FOURTH TEST OF GENERAL RELATIVITY: PRELIMINARY RESULTS Irwin I. Shapiro, * Gordon H. Pettengill, Michael E. Ash, Melvin L. Stone, William B. Smith, Richard P. Ingalls, and Richard A. Brockelman Lincoln Laboratory,† Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lexington, Massachusetts (Received 11 March 1968) Several years ago it became evident that a new test of general relativity was technically feasi-ble.' The proposed experiment was designed to verify the prediction that the speed of propagation of a light ray decreases as it passes through a region of increasing gravitational potential. For a radar pulse transmitted from the earth and reflected by another planet, the increase in the round-trip time delay, attributable to the predicted gravitational influence of the sun on the propagation, would be ~200 µsec if the path of the pulse were to graze the solar limb.
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Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 15:42:27 UTC Robert McNees
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Shapiro et al tested the idea in 1966-67, first with Venus and then with Mercury, at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory Haystack radar site.
The results agreed with the predictions of general relativity to well within the expected uncertainties. #TeamRadar
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.20.1265

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