Problems of Experimental Verification of the Theory of General Relativity

— On April 14, 2007, at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Jacksonville (Florida), the famous American gyroscopist Francis Everitt reported on the preliminary results of an experiment on a special artificial Earth satellite with cryogenic gyroscopes. In the experiment, which was started in August 2005 and completed in August 2006, a gyroscope was used to measure the curvature of space-time in the vicinity of Earth, which is determined by the distribution of matter due to the basic postulate of general relativity. In this note, we discuss the difficulties that had to be overcome in preparing this experiment.