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More Spacecraft Velocity Anomalies
ZonkerWilliam recommends a bulletin from the American Institute of Physics, which discusses a study noting that recent spacecraft, such as NEAR, appear to display velocity anomalies much like those seen in Pioneer 10 (which were observed beginning ten years ago). The anomalies amount to up to 13 mm/sec., with a measurement accuracy of 0.1 mm/sec. Quoting: "A new look at the trajectories for various spacecraft as they fly past the Earth finds in each case a tiny amount of surplus velocity. For craft that pursue a path mostly symmetrical with respect to the equator, the effect is minimal. For craft that pursue a more unsymmetrical path, the effect is larger."
Does anyone else feel like they just read the first console in an old Bungie game? We should probably be arming ourselves.
I'm sorry officer; I was experiencing a velocity anomaly.
gravitons display a bias for polar rather than equatorial output. this was the basis for the graviton engine that first bought man...
oh shit, forgot what time line was in, you guys aren't supposed to discover this until 2039. dang it, screwed up again. i'll have to shut this time line down...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We're sorry about the bugs you've been observing lately. The latest anomalies are due to bug #14310, a hardware glitch much like those present in your own Pentium processors.
We're trying as hard as we can to mitigate this issue, primarily by avoiding the use of floating point calculations in our physics engine. In the meantime, we're manually changing your physics books so that you'll be able to calculate the ship's movement correctly. In one day, you'll have no memory that this incident ever happened, so do not worry.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I thought it was "Here, hold my beer."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Once you leave Earth for a while, particularly if you travel far, you realize that it doesn't suck quite as much as you thought.
A similar phenomenon occurs when traveling outside of the U.S.
The precision of the measurements is 0.1 mm/sec, not the accuracy. Those are different things.
The range isn't an issue, it's how accurately they can measure doppler. The standard technique is to transmit a special signal to the spacecraft, which retransmits it to the Earth, like an RF mirror. This allows them to use extremely stable ground-based oscillators, like Hydrogen masers. This signal can also be modulated with a PN code to allow precise range measurements.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The Pioneer 10 and 11 speed-position anomalies, unaccounted drift, were noticed by the late 70's. NASA and the peole involved just didn't discuss it with the public until much later, after many potential sources of error and theoretical possiblities had been analyzed. That is when I first heard it mentioned, in Houston, ca 1977-78.
Here is the summary from the article:
If a large volume of empty space surrounds the matter of the cosmos, so that the cosmos can have a centre of mass, then the matter is in a deep gravitational potential 'well'. If space is expanding and spreading the matter outward, then the depth of the well is decreasing. According to general relativity, especially a new solution of Einstein's equations derived in the Appendix (which also deals with Birkhoff's theorem), the decreasing depth continuously shortens 'radar' distances within the well, causing the observed apparent acceleration. The magnitude of the anomalous acceleration implies the bottom of the potential well has not yet risen very far above the critical depth for gravitational time dilation. Thus the Pioneer effect supports the essentials of several creationist cosmologies: a centre of mass, expansion of space and recent time dilation. Big bang theorists, whose cosmology does not have a centre of mass, cannot use this explanation.
I can't speak to this specific case, but someone did a study several years ago of the Voyager anomaly and whether it could be a gravitational effect. The gist of the analysis was the if it were gravitational, it would also affect the distribution of long-period comets, especially the "new" ones from the Oort cloud. They calculated the effect you'd expect and it's much too large relative to what we see in the comets, so whatever is affecting Voyager pretty much cannot be gravitational in nature.
It's also worth noting that even in the mega-analysis by Anderson et al. concluded that although they couldn't determine a source for the anomaly, they still generally felt that it was more likely to be endogenic than exogenic.
I think it is more of the human ability to interpret vagueness into anything. The genesis description of the origin of the universe lends itself to analogy, which he uses in that paper. Now his physics may be accurate in that the Universe may extend much further than the matter we can detect, and that may explain the velocity anomaly. But to extend that to say that a very vague story from 3000 years ago is a true an accurate description of the universe's origins and that therefore the bible is literally true is just fantasy.
I've never been a believer. Recently, after reading The Selfish Gene and seeing just how much real evidence there is for evolution and seeing that science really _is_ an accurate and true explanation for how we came to be on the earth. It really does explain away any "need" for any sort of "personal god" as an alternate explanation. So, to give equal time to "the other side", I tried to read the bible. I got thru Genesis, but realized that there really is "nothing there" as far as explanatory power. And certainly to try to extract morals from the old testament would be a mistake. So then I got "Skeptics Answered" and again, there really isn't anything to the arguments of the believers.
While I'm interested in why people believe, and how we can change that going forward, I've really lost interest in _what_ they believe. It really holds no value as near as I can tell.
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Antisymmetric is when you hate Jews right?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?