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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."
while it is possible that the explanation will be mundane--such as thrust from gas leakage--the possibility of entirely new physics is also being considered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly
Strangest of all:
Data from the Galileo and Ulysses spacecraft indicate a similar effect
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
And another guess, but surely the gentlest squirrel's fart as the craft left Earth could translate to huge discrepancies by the time they get to the other side of the solar system?
I love this story, it's been popping up every now & then ever since my first accepted Slashdot submission on the topic more than five years ago... it's really very interesting, even if (as seems likely) it turns out the be a missing factor or inaccurate measurement somewhere, rather than a Whole New Physics[tm].
I've often wondered whether gravity is really exactly a one-over-r-squared phenomenon. I would think that between the curvature of space, strange hidden dimensions, dark matter and dark energy, that things would not be exactly Euclidean and that the exponent on the equation for gravity wouldn't be an integer.
IANAP, but as an engineer I've learned that so-called "constants" seldom are.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
We are still in contact with the Voyager probes, and they have, at this point, traveled further out of the solar system than the Pioneer probes. Has the same anomaly been spotted in their trajectories too? That would be of great importance in weeding out possible phenomena.
It seems to be a no-brainer that the most likely cause is gravitaional force from something we didnt know was there. Some kupier belt trash, comet that passed it years ago, who knows. I'm frankly surprised that these types of navigational issues were/are not expected .....
The codes used took into account all the major sources of gravity, including all the planets and major asteroids. These are some of the same codes that have been used to place many, many other probes in proper orbits around planetary bodies as far away as Saturn, and land on tiny things like asteroids and comets.
The damned thing about the Pioneer anomaly is that the acceleration is constant and the measurement is exceedingly simple. It's just position vs. time. There isn't much that can mess with that, and since individual communications with the craft are uncorrelated with each other, there shouldn't be any kind of drift (relativistic clock drifts are taken into account). Since the acceleration is constant over a distance from roughly Jupiter to well past Pluto, and gravity follows a force law that goes like 1/r^2, you can't add a single source of gravity (e.g. a new planet) -- the force wouldn't be constant. You can't make the sun slightly heavier. You can't add dark matter to do it: the dark matter would have to conspire to have a density as a function of distance from the sun that mimicked the constant acceleration. Such a density profile has more dark matter at the edges of the solar system, which would not be stable. It should collapse and concentrate near the sun. The acceleration is approximately the same magnitude as the expansion of the universe, but it's in the wrong direction, and our current understanding of dark energy wouldn't cause such an effect anyway.
Personally, I think we've got gravity totally wrong.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
The Kuiper Cliff (#10) fascinates me. I'd not heard about that, but I was aware that a peculiar wobble in the orbits of all the planets suggested that a very large object was orbiting in the distance. The Twin Sun theories are very interesting, especially in how they link to cyclical comet clusters bombarding the earth into the stone age every few thousand years. We're due right now, according to some.
I also find #12 interesting. (The not-so-constant constants). At first glance, it appears to fit well with the idea that there are various levels of energy 'density', providing different levels of reality in which beings can exist. One idea posits that UFOs are visitors from a higher level of reality which is constantly around us.
#13 is funny. (Cold Fusion), --Largely because the editor used pissy wording to describe Pons & Fleischmann's work, probably because he was numbered among those who scoffed at the pair and would prefer to believe that it was somehow the two researcher's faults that he wasn't smart or brave enough to give them more credit.)
And of course #4. (Homeopathy). The solution to accepting that homeopathy works links nicely with many other theories considered bunkish, but which also "somehow" carry weight. Basically, it's not the molecule as much as it is the energetic vibration of the molecule which carries information, and which responds to the body. This is Chi in a nutshell; a whole layer of energetic reality which affects pretty much everything in our universe, upon which astrology, awareness and the spirit, (among other things) are based, but which nobody wants to look at. Except the dark corners of the military, which know how to manipulate aspects of it. CFL's produce how much radio interference? More than cell phones and microwaves and TV's? Hmm.
-FL