STANFORD, Calif.  For 46 years, Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist, has promoted the often perilous fortunes of Gravity Probe B, perhaps the most exotic, “Star Trek”-ish experiment ever undertaken in space. Finally, with emergency financial help from a pair of unusual sources, success is at hand.

Conceived in the late 1950s, financed by $750 million from NASA and launched into orbit in 2004, the Gravity Probe B spacecraft has sought to prove two tenets of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The first, called the geodetic effect, holds that a large celestial body like Earth will warp time the way a rubber sheet stretches when a bowling ball is placed on it. The second, known as frame-dragging, occurs when the rotation of a large body “twists” nearby space and time; turn the resting bowling ball, and the rubber sheet twists.

To measure these phenomena, Dr. Everitt and his Stanford team equipped Gravity Probe B with a special telescope attached to several gyroscopes. They pointed the telescope at a “guide star,” IM Pegasi, and then spun up the gyros with their axes also fixed on the guide star. If Einstein was right, the gyros would drift slightly over time to follow the space-time distortion.

The Stanford team collected 11 ½ months’ worth of transmissions from Gravity Probe B, but tiny unforeseen drift in the gyros fouled the results. Dr. Everitt had to ask NASA for extra time and money so his 11-member team could figure out how to scrub the data.