关键词: Thomas precession, precession of planetary orbits, de Sitter precession, Lense-Thirring precession

Abstract: Relativists have exposed various precessions and developed ingenious experiments to verify those phenomena with extreme precisions. The Gravity Probe B mission was designed to study the precessions of the gyroscopes rotating round the Earth in a nearly circular near-Earth polar orbit to demonstrate the geodetic effect and the Lense-Thirring effect as predicted by the general relativity theory. In this paper, we show in a very simple and novel analysis that the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, the Thomas precession, and the precession data (on the de Sitter and Lense-Thirring precessions) collected from the Gravity Probe B mission could easily be explained from classical physics, too.

Key words: Thomas precession, precession of planetary orbits, de Sitter precession, Lense-Thirring precession