An important early prediction of Einstein's general relativity was the advance of the perihelion of Mercury's orbit, whose measurement provided one of the classical tests of Einstein's theory. The advance of the orbital point-of-closest-approach also applies to a binary pulsar system and to an Earth-orbiting satellite. General relativity also predicts that the rotation of a body like Earth will drag the local inertial frames of reference around it, which will affect the orbit of a satellite. This Lense-Thirring effect has hitherto not been detected with high accuracy, but its detection with an error of about 1 per cent is the main goal of Gravity Probe B--an ongoing space mission using orbiting gyroscopes. Here we report a measurement of the Lense-Thirring effect on two Earth satellites: it is 99 +/- 5 per cent of the value predicted by general relativity; the uncertainty of this measurement includes all known random and systematic errors, but we allow for a total +/- 10 per cent uncertainty to include underestimated and unknown sources of error.

The Lense-Thirring effect, a tiny perturbation of the orbit of a particle caused by the spin of the attracting body, was accurately measured with the use of the data of two laser-ranged satellites, LAGEOS and LAGEOS II, and the Earth gravitational model EGM-96. The parameter &mgr;, which measures the strength of the Lense-Thirring effect, was found to be 1.1 +/- 0.2; general relativity predicts &mgr; identical with 1. This result represents an accurate test and measurement of one of the fundamental predictions of general relativity, that the spin of a body changes the geometry of the universe by generating space-time curvature.

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