Help Solve the Mystery of the Pioneer Anomaly

deglr6328 writes "Very soon, NASA will be dismantling and scrapping its only computer left which is able to access and process the data on its ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes. "Who cares", you say? Well, the Planetary Society for one and they're hoping you might care as well. The data held on these (few hundred) tapes is no ordinary forgettable data, it is the complete archive of the first 15 years of all the data returned to Earth by the Pioneer spacecraft which were sent into interstellar space. This additional and thus far unexamined data (the data after 1988 is available and has already been examined) may hold the key to solving what is considered one of the top problems in physics today, the so called Pioneer anomaly, where the observed trajectory of these spacecraft (and a couple others) deviates noticeably from our very precise expectation. The reason for the anomaly may be as mundane as uneven radiation pressure or escaping thruster fuel or it may be as groundbreaking as a clue to completely new physics, perhaps related to dark matter or dark energy. The Planetary Society is planning on recovering this data and poring over it meticulously to look for something which may have been missed or hidden from current investigations into the phenomenon. They need money to do this, about $250,000, and are asking for donations to fund the project. You do not need to be a member to donate. There are no serious proposals to send any more spin-stabilized spacecraft on solar escape trajectories any time in the near future and this is probably the only tenable method we have to directly investigate this mystery in the interim."

Comments

RTFF

[spellraiser]

From the FAQ:

Will the data be made publicly available?
Yes. First, the data first must be recovered, validated, documented, and preliminary analyses must be done. After those tasks are completed (probably taking months to a year), the data will be made publicly available, including second-order data products when the raw data is processed by JPL orbit software.

Re:Why the deviance?

[tgrimley]

from the wikipedia link:

"When all known forces acting on the spacecraft are taken into consideration, a very small but unexplained force remains. It causes a constant sunwards acceleration of (8.74 ± 1.33) × 10^-10 m/s2 for both spacecraft.

...

"Data from the Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft are also indicative of a similar effect, although for various reasons (such as their relative proximity to the Sun) firm conclusions cannot be drawn from these sources."

Re:Archive in different format

[mikeswi]

That's just what they're planning to do. The problem is that the current format can only be understood by a particular type of obsolete computer that NASA is about to scrap.

I had a letter somewhere that explained the problem in detail but I must have tossed it (I'm a member of the society, so I get the occasional mailing). They're planning to port the data to a modern format so it can be examined properly.

Re:Why the deviance?

[mollymoo]

Is there a Voyager anomaly?

Perhaps. We don't know because Voyager, like most other spacecraft, is 3-axis stabilised. That means it keeps pointed the right way using only its thrusters. Pioneer is spin stabilised, like a rifle bullet in flight, so requires much smaller pointing corrections using thrusters. The anomaly is a very slight one, so slight that it is lost in the uncertainty caused by the level of thruster activity on 3-axis stabilised craft.

I own a Kennedy 9-Track and a very old 7 track

[jbottoms]

These tapes should be readable on any midrange or mainframe. I own a Pr1me computer which should serve the purpose. Contactinformation is below: Jeffrey Bottoms, 4405 Pease #3, Houston, TX 77023

I talked to the guy who used to run Pioneer...

[david.given]

...and the situation is as follows:

• The data used to be stored on magnetic tape. When the tape started deteriorating, all the data was archived off onto then state-of-the-art MO disks.
• The machine used was a MicroVAX with a DEC RWZ21 SCSI MO drive, which is apparently quite rare. The disks are 128MB each.
• For Pioneer 10, there are 155 disks, making 19840 MB of data.
• For Pioneer 11, there are 217 disks, making 27776 MB of data.
• Each disk takes about 10 minutes to read to the MicroVAX, and then more time to move across onto a real computer, of course.

I would have happily volunteered to spend a couple of days swapping disks in order to salvage all this lot, but alas, I'm the wrong side of the Atlantic. The guy in charge has recently been made redundant, and he was desperate to find someone to hand off all this to... but there's incredible beaurocracy. (I gather all the data was actually supposed to have been destroyed some years ago, but through some 'oversight' hadn't been.)

Alas, I don't have permission to publish his address, but I'll put him in touch with the Planetary Society on the off chance he doesn't know about this.

Interestingly, for years he ran the Pioneer spacecraft off a Mac Quadra 950! Check out the screen shots...