Peering beneath the surface of Mars and other planets to reveal
buried geological features could get easier, thanks to a nifty new
silicon gadget.
The device, called a gravity gradiometer, has been designed to
measure how much the force of gravity changes from place to place,
enabling it to map a planet's gravitational field.
The idea is simple. Take two masses, each hanging from a spring. If
one mass is slightly closer to a planet's surface, it will feel
stronger gravity and pull more on its spring than the other mass.
Compare the pulls on the two springs, and you can work out the
gravity gradient over that part of the planet. A gravity gradiometer
aboard the European Space Agency's GOCE satellite is currently
probing Earth's gravity field, but it has a mass of hundreds of
kilograms. Being so heavy, it would be prohibitively expensive to
send such a device on a deep-space mission.
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327206.400-miniature-gravity-detector-could-peer-inside-planets.html>Link
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