  The LAGEOS 3 (today LARES 2) space experiment was proposed in the eighties by
the Physics Department and by the Center of Space Research (CSR) of the
University of Texas (UT) at Austin and by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to
test and accurately measure frame-dragging, with the strong support of John
Archibald Wheeler, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics of UT Austin.
Frame-dragging is an intriguing phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theory of
general relativity which has fundamental implications in high energy
astrophysics and in the generation of gravitational waves by spinning black
holes. LAGEOS 3 was reproposed in 2016 to the Italian Space Agency and to the
European Space Agency as a technologically much improved version of LAGEOS 3
under the name LARES 2 (LAres RElativity Satellite 2) and then successfully
launched in 2022 with the new launch vehicle VEGA C of ASI, ESA and AVIO.
Today, after almost forty years since the original proposal, we report the
first results of the LARES 2 space experiment to test general relativity. The
results are in complete agreement with the predictions of Einstein's
gravitational theory. Whereas previous results already confirmed the
frame-dragging prediction, the conceptual relative simplicity of the LARES 2
experiment with respect to the previous tests with the LARES and LAGEOS
satellites provides a significant advance in the field of tests of general
relativity.
