An Absolute Determination of the Gravitational Acceleration at Sydney, Australia

An absolute determination of the acceleration due to gravity has been completed at the Australian National Standards Laboratory. The experiment was of the free rise-and-fall type using a corner-reflector as the moving body. The value of g obtained was 9.796 720 m s-2, which is 138 μm s-2 below the value assigned to the site on the old Potsdam system. The estimated uncertainty of the result is ± 2 μm s-2(± 2 parts in 107).