Gravity Probe-DM: The Gravitational Laboratory for Dark Matter

Abstract

Dark matter is inferred gravitationally across the Universe but has not been detected within the Solar System. The Sun inevitably focuses incident unbound dark matter into an irreducible downstream wake. Its structure encodes the incoming density and velocity distribution and, for wave dark matter, the de Broglie scale. We propose Gravity Probe-DM, a heliocentric search using precision ranging between spacecrafts. The exact two-spacecraft observable is the differential wake acceleration; for a short baseline, it becomes the wake tidal tensor projected along the baseline. For a $2.5\times10^6\,\mathrm{km}$ baseline crossing a $0.1\,\mathrm{AU}$ coherent width at $30\,\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}}$, a one-percent excess gives a raw uniform-core range scale of $0.63\,\mathrm{pm}$ over $5.77\,\mathrm d$. While the projected tide remains coherent over an interval $T$, the free response grows as $T^2$, reaching $2.5\,\mathrm{nm}$ over one year. An illustrative low-lag dark-disk component carrying $20\%$ of the reference local density and reaching a $30\%$ focused contrast gives a one-year scale of about $15\,\mathrm{nm}$. These pre-fit response scales show that trajectory design can move the signal from sub-picometre to nanometre scales. A detection would provide a purely gravitational map of local dark matter and probe the flow that produced it, including particle versus wave focusing. The Sun supplies the lens, spacecraft sample the wake, and precision ranging reads out its gravitational imprint.