Slashdot Mirror
Computer Forensics to Help Solve Pioneer Mystery
Matthew Sparkes writes "Launched 35 years ago on Friday, Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to reach the outer Solar System and return pictures of Jupiter, closely followed by Pioneer 11. However, the twin Pioneer spacecraft drifted off course (see number 8) by hundreds of thousands of kilometres during their three-decade mission, and NASA eventually lost contact with them. An international team of scientists, including many amatuer hobbyists, are re-analysing the tracking and telemetry data in the hope of discovering the reason."
Heh. I think most of us here on Slashdot would want this anomaly to be due to new and k3wl physics rather than some mundane error. The Pioneer anomaly is one of, if not the most interesting unexplained observation I know of.
The article makes it clear they're trying to discover the cause. That so many different parties are involved, it would be unlikely that anyone would deliberately ignore "an unknown external influence". - a false negative. Indeed it would be strange to put that much effort in without the potential excitement of really discovering something. an increased risk of a false positive. Peer review of the results is a powerful tool for this kind of issue...
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
It would actually make sense to look for a single condition in the myriad of possible known phenomena. That's basically what Occam's Razor says. There's no sense in looking for a complex or radical solution until all of the simple possibilities have been exhausted.
This doesn't mean that I'm advocating ignoring re-investigating things from fairly basic principles, but at the same time I think that it would be foolish to immediately assume that something that we haven't yet had any notion of is the culprit. It would be pretty neat if the effect was something new, but you can't assume it's new until you've eliminated all of the other possibilities.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.