Anyone who says that there is "no chance", "nearly no chance" or anything other than "we don't have enough data yet" is just trying to stem public panic by treating you like a child.
The authors of the paper you link said pretty much exactly that in their abstract. Saying "we don't have enough data yet" is a cop-out; we know enough to make a pretty good prediction, which is all you can ever do.
Did you read the quote? The problem isn't whether asteroids are a threat, it's whether this bureaucrat knows the first thing about what he's talking about. You will note, for example, that 2036 (when Apophis has the highest chance of actually hitting Earth that we know of) is not "by 2032" as Perminov states. Also, "it seems to me there's a chance" and that he "heard from a scientist" are extremely dubious things to state. Either he has facts and figures (they exist) and could name his source, but he's a really poor communicator for his job level, or he's just making stuff up. Either way, it doesn't really inspire confidence in me. Does it make you feel like this project is going places?
Actually, it sounds like Perminov has no idea what he's talking about to begin with, so it seems unlikely that this will go anywhere. Consider this quote, from the original AP article:
Without mentioning NASA's conclusions, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. "I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032," Perminov said.
Note that the NASA conclusion is that, no, there will be no strike in 2032 and unlikely in 2036. It sounds like he's a bureaucrat trying to make himself important by making up a job. That doesn't bode well for the projecting going anywhere.
The US does, in fact (and long has) important oil from Iraq and we get well over 10% of our oil from the Gulf/Middle East at ~15%, approximately what we get from Canada. Which is, to be fair to you, the largest source of US oil.
Mercury has a large iron core. Larger than a small planet should, in fact, have. This doesn't particularly alter the surface composition (which is rocky), but it can be fairly characterized generically as "metallic".
No more than Earth has. The problem with Venus's surface is that it's just too hot and it has lost its water. The fact that the carbon (dioxide) is more in the atmosphere than Earth is a by-product of these facts.
Mars is missing nitrogen.
It's not clear you need much and I don't think Mars actually lacks nitrogen in particular. It's just quite chilly and has a thin, thin atmosphere. It lacks everything, really.
You seem to have defined "habitable" as "just like Earth", which yields predictable results. The more generally accepted idea of requirements for life are water, basic elements (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen in particular), and an energy source. Those are based on terrestrial life, admittedly, but it's a list built by examining what Earth life seems to actually need and not what's, at best, nice to have.
Methane is the precursor to organic molecules, in a more general sense, not the result of biological processes. When you're the simplest combination of carbon (what, the fourth most abundant element in the universe?) and hydrogen (the most abundant element), it's hard to argue that your existence requires biological processes. (Particularly as methane is found everywhere volatiles can be found in our solar system and outside of it.)
Perhaps you're confused by the fact that methane on Earth is usually the result of biological activity? That's because in our peculiar atmosphere, methane can't survive long before oxidation.
Actually, the climate researchers would benefit most from keeping things in doubt. If they sell it is a largely settled question (which they are), they're also saying that we don't need as much research into the science, just the solutions.
Also, any researcher who can definitely show that AGW isn't real would pretty well set up her reputation as top of the field and almost guarantee that she's set up for life. That's how science works: you make the biggest reputation not by affirming the status quo but by smashing it.
I wasn't trying to say that private enterprise doesn't have advantages. It surely does. I'm merely saying that the conservative mantra, "Business is better than government," has yet to be supported by any real data to me.
However,
And a private company is going to respect human life as well, and not out of any particular goodness, but because if a vehicle is killing astronauts, it is likely to kill the company.
I think that there are plenty of examples of companies clearly not valuing human lives, either of their customers or their employees, as long as they can save more money than it costs them. Hardly a month goes by without a scandal of some outfit violating OSHA standards and someone getting hurt as a result. Walmart is a prime example. For crying out loud, they've been caught locking their night employees in the stores. The list of reasons that that's a safety hazard is as long as my arm.
Skimping on safety for the sake of saving money or pushing schedules is as likely to happen in a government program as they are with private development.
See, that's where I disagree. It's not for noble reasons, of course, but governments aren't really concerned about the cost as much as businesses (which is why people always claim that business is better), but they are sensitive, probably more so, to public opinion. Every time NASA kills astronauts, it's a major media event and there is considerable public concern over it. Boeing could do it in one of their plants and it would barely make headlines, let alone put a dent in their profits.
Imagine the army, or the navy, organized like NASA is. We'd have 500 soldiers, 500 doctors, 1000 accountants, 1500 medics, 20,000 officer (with at least 1000 flag officers) and 500 hopeful politicians. Not to mention about 50 infiltrators from the competition. Oh, I forgot the 200 embedded journalists.
I want to assume you're joking. The Department of Defense is run like NASA. Probably more so.
And don't give us the "private enterprise does better" argument without proof. We've seen how the aerospace companies handle unmanned flight, and it's not really that impressive. They have plenty of launch failures and mission screw-ups. A good friend (who researchers Mars) is fond of noting that all of the recent Mars failures are basically the fault of Lockheed-Martin, for example.
My guess is that if private enterprise ran manned spaceflight, they'd just shrug at any losses and call it the "cost of doing business". And then they'd probably vote themselves fat bonuses for saving money by not spending it on crew safety. (I don't think I need to give examples of companies doing basically this in other industries.) That's a cynical view, to be sure, and you're welcome to not share it. But if you do want to disagree here, please explain why rather than taking it is an axiom that private business fixes everything.
Exactly so. In his position, he'll be responsible if something does happen, so he'll try to take whatever steps he can to stop it. That's politics. Does it suck? Yeah. Would he be a better man if he could stop just shy of that line every time? Certainly. Is it our jobs (as citizens, but also especially Congress) to stop him? You bet.
What I want to see, however, is that he's making these attempts to assume powers IN OPEN COURT. What got most of us about the Bush Administration wasn't that they had a rather... permissive... view on the Fourth Amendment. It was that they had it in secret and apparently knew full well that they were wrong. (When Qwest asked for warrants for the phone taps, the Justice Department just quietly left, apparently. That tells me that they knew that they didn't have a legal leg to stand on.)
Yet the ancients' circular planetary paths, sans epicycles, more accurately described the reality of elliptical orbits. Ptolemy's theory had more mistakes (geocentrism, circular orbits, epicycles) than the older model (geocentrism and circular orbits) and was therefore a less accurate model of reality, but it was more useful because it better fit the data given his preconceived notions about reality, that is, a geocentric solar system.
I don't really see it that way. Both models are, from all current evidence, intrinsically flawed and I can't see that either one is more flawed. More to the point, at the time they couldn't have known about Kepler's laws (their observational accuracy couldn't have distinguished Kepler and Ptolemy anyway), so how on Earth does one judge based on anything but how accurate the theory is against the current observations?
"More useful" is not a good idea, either. Newton's laws are generally more useful than Relativity since for most applications they're approximately equal and Newton's equations are easier to deal with. But in no sense are Newton's laws currently accepted over Relativity.
On top of that, for a particular application I may approximate even Newton's laws pretty heavily. Again, this doesn't mean we're accepting the approximation over Newton's laws, we're just making use of a useful approximation.
(And as an epicyclic aside: epicycles on circular orbits do, in fact, more closely match Kepler's laws than straight Copernican circles do. In fact, I use that approximation essentially all the time in my rings research. So, again, it's not at all obvious to me why you think circular, geocentric models are more "true" than the Ptolemaic model.)
Actually, they were more accurate. That was the point of Tycho's data and Kepler's predictions about transits of Mercury and Venus. But what had kept the heliocentric model alive all of those years when it wasn't more accurate (actually, I've read that it may have been *less* accurate) was the elegance.
That said, if you have two theories and one is more elegant but matches the data worse, it's rejected (at least until it can be improved upon). All the elegance in the universe isn't worth squat if you don't have accuracy.
I'm not sure I can agree that "better" is clearer that "more accurate". If you need to ask what standard "accurate" is judged by, I can't imagine the standards of "better" are any clearer. ("Better" can, in fact, mean many things. More accurate, more elegant, more in line with our preconceived notion, etc. It's difficult to see what else "more accurate" can mean.)
This is, perhaps, a minor quibble with wording. (Depending on what you meant.) But no, neither is likely to be right. One will be shown to be wrong before the other, however. Or, if you prefer, one will probably be more accurate.
Did you read my post at all? A factor of 2 variation in 0.1% of the Sun's total power is irrelevant. You're quibbling about an immaterial detail in the hopes of distracting attention from the main show.
Uh, what does that fluctuation in that plot prove? The change is less than a W/m^2, if I'm doing my math right (out of a total insolation of 1300 W/m^2) and x-rays and EUV don't make it to the surface of the Earth anyway. (This is why astronomers keep launching those telescopes into space, remember.)
[*] Ok, a pedant might argue that it has some internal degrees of freedom, nuclear hyperfine levels etc, that are irrelevant here.
Actually, you needn't look to such minute differences. Different isotopes do react at slightly different rates, so biological processes often enrich molecules in one isotope over another. I don't know of any way to use this to trace CO2's source, but it has been used to chemically trace the earliest appearances of photosynthesis on Earth, for example.
That said, your post is right: you can reasonably accurately measure and sum the man-made carbon sources.
hat is because you are on the earth with a considerable mass compared to your mass. If you did this experiment of charging yourself up in relation to another object, in a gravity free or gravity neutral environment, you might be surprised how much a small charge can affect the movement of a mass comparable to that of your body.
No, not at all. The acceleration is necessarily the same in both situations. And you're totally dodging the point, which is you're quantization of the intrinsically unquantizable.
Astronomers and astrophysicists have no or very little training into the behavior of electrically charged objects and fields.
And now I'm guessing you don't actually know any astrophysics or know any astrophysicists. I am an astrophysicist. I assure you, we have many graduate classes that are rich in E&M. I, for example, had no fewer than three graduate courses that were basically plasma physics (which is basically applied E&M) in different contexts. Most programs require Jackson E&M, too.
Also, you seem to be confusing "astronomer" with "engineer". It's the latter who would be trying to figure out whether the probes' accelerations are intrinsic or extrinsic. (The voted for the former, last I check. And 1/3 of it, so far, has turned out to be.)
Aaaand, I see you're an Electric Universe person. Never mind, the above isn't meant for you. This discussion is effectively over.
I wasn't saying that the underlying physics can't be the same. I was say that the effects are different. When we find two phenomenon that aren't obviously the same, we give them different names so we can keep them straight. Calling one the other (whether or not you personally suspect that they're related by the underlying cause) is sloppy terminology and confusing.
An electric field, even a very weak one, affects a charged object 36 orders of magnitude more than gravity.
Nonsense. You just quantified something that's not quantifiable. How massive is the test body, whats the charge, what's the strength of the E-field, and what's the size and distance to the larger body? If you're going to pretend to be able to give numbers, you have to give us the whole story. I've often carried a small charge (shuffle your feet on the carpet to try it yourself) and never have I found my weight has noticeably changed.
You can't globally compare forces like that. You can compare them in specific instances, sure. But you can't just wave your hand and claim that one is N times more powerful than another. (Yes, I know people do it. They're wrong.)
The Pioneer probes may have a slight positive charge, which means they would slow down a little more than we would expect by gravity alone.
Without running the numbers to be sure, I'm pretty sure you'd need too much charge for that to work. Electrons are easy to accelerate with an electric field, their charge-to-mass ratio is large. Macroscopic objects like probes and humans have lower charge-to-mass ratios (we tend to be close to charge neutral for obvious reasons) and it takes a much strong field to accelerate us remotely comparably.
The problem with Voyager data is that they course correct using thrusters and so their exact location is more uncertain.
No, not really. The location is what's being measured. The problem with Voyagers is that since they use thrusters, you don't know precisely enough what impulses were applied to them. If you don't know that, you can't remove it from the tracking data to reveal the small anomaly.
Also, if it is frame dragging, it doesn't explain Pioneer very well I can't imagine (being really damn far from any rotating mass and all). Additionally, I don't believe it makes sense to ascribe different instances on the same probe being due to passing Earth with rather than against the rotation: unless the probe is going out in the solar system and then, later back in again, the flyby will have the same orientation, albeit at different distances and latitudes. (On the other hand, you'd expect different effects, but not *zero* effect in one case, no matter what the relationship between the flybys is.)
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Anyone who says that there is "no chance", "nearly no chance" or anything other than "we don't have enough data yet" is just trying to stem public panic by treating you like a child.
The authors of the paper you link said pretty much exactly that in their abstract. Saying "we don't have enough data yet" is a cop-out; we know enough to make a pretty good prediction, which is all you can ever do.
Did you read the quote? The problem isn't whether asteroids are a threat, it's whether this bureaucrat knows the first thing about what he's talking about. You will note, for example, that 2036 (when Apophis has the highest chance of actually hitting Earth that we know of) is not "by 2032" as Perminov states. Also, "it seems to me there's a chance" and that he "heard from a scientist" are extremely dubious things to state. Either he has facts and figures (they exist) and could name his source, but he's a really poor communicator for his job level, or he's just making stuff up. Either way, it doesn't really inspire confidence in me. Does it make you feel like this project is going places?
Actually, it sounds like Perminov has no idea what he's talking about to begin with, so it seems unlikely that this will go anywhere. Consider this quote, from the original AP article:
Without mentioning NASA's conclusions, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. "I don't remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032," Perminov said.
Note that the NASA conclusion is that, no, there will be no strike in 2032 and unlikely in 2036. It sounds like he's a bureaucrat trying to make himself important by making up a job. That doesn't bode well for the projecting going anywhere.
(Phil Plait has talked about this, too.)
The guys who made the movies released the clips (separately, no annoying music) here.
How about the original, direct route to the guys who made the movies?
http://ciclops.org/view_event/124/Cassinis_Holiday_Greetings
Leaving aside the broader question, about which I really don't want to speculate, period, the DOE says you're wrong in your data:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html
and http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_m.htm
The US does, in fact (and long has) important oil from Iraq and we get well over 10% of our oil from the Gulf/Middle East at ~15%, approximately what we get from Canada. Which is, to be fair to you, the largest source of US oil.
Helium, not hydrogen. And true, but planetary scientists don't tend to be that broad in their use of the term "metal".
Mercury has a large iron core. Larger than a small planet should, in fact, have. This doesn't particularly alter the surface composition (which is rocky), but it can be fairly characterized generically as "metallic".
"Blob" however is silly.
Venus has too much carbon.
No more than Earth has. The problem with Venus's surface is that it's just too hot and it has lost its water. The fact that the carbon (dioxide) is more in the atmosphere than Earth is a by-product of these facts.
Mars is missing nitrogen.
It's not clear you need much and I don't think Mars actually lacks nitrogen in particular. It's just quite chilly and has a thin, thin atmosphere. It lacks everything, really.
You seem to have defined "habitable" as "just like Earth", which yields predictable results. The more generally accepted idea of requirements for life are water, basic elements (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen in particular), and an energy source. Those are based on terrestrial life, admittedly, but it's a list built by examining what Earth life seems to actually need and not what's, at best, nice to have.
Methane is the precursor to organic molecules, in a more general sense, not the result of biological processes. When you're the simplest combination of carbon (what, the fourth most abundant element in the universe?) and hydrogen (the most abundant element), it's hard to argue that your existence requires biological processes. (Particularly as methane is found everywhere volatiles can be found in our solar system and outside of it.)
Perhaps you're confused by the fact that methane on Earth is usually the result of biological activity? That's because in our peculiar atmosphere, methane can't survive long before oxidation.
Actually, the climate researchers would benefit most from keeping things in doubt. If they sell it is a largely settled question (which they are), they're also saying that we don't need as much research into the science, just the solutions.
Also, any researcher who can definitely show that AGW isn't real would pretty well set up her reputation as top of the field and almost guarantee that she's set up for life. That's how science works: you make the biggest reputation not by affirming the status quo but by smashing it.
I wasn't trying to say that private enterprise doesn't have advantages. It surely does. I'm merely saying that the conservative mantra, "Business is better than government," has yet to be supported by any real data to me.
However,
And a private company is going to respect human life as well, and not out of any particular goodness, but because if a vehicle is killing astronauts, it is likely to kill the company.
I think that there are plenty of examples of companies clearly not valuing human lives, either of their customers or their employees, as long as they can save more money than it costs them. Hardly a month goes by without a scandal of some outfit violating OSHA standards and someone getting hurt as a result. Walmart is a prime example. For crying out loud, they've been caught locking their night employees in the stores. The list of reasons that that's a safety hazard is as long as my arm.
Skimping on safety for the sake of saving money or pushing schedules is as likely to happen in a government program as they are with private development.
See, that's where I disagree. It's not for noble reasons, of course, but governments aren't really concerned about the cost as much as businesses (which is why people always claim that business is better), but they are sensitive, probably more so, to public opinion. Every time NASA kills astronauts, it's a major media event and there is considerable public concern over it. Boeing could do it in one of their plants and it would barely make headlines, let alone put a dent in their profits.
Imagine the army, or the navy, organized like NASA is. We'd have 500 soldiers, 500 doctors, 1000 accountants, 1500 medics, 20,000 officer (with at least 1000 flag officers) and 500 hopeful politicians. Not to mention about 50 infiltrators from the competition. Oh, I forgot the 200 embedded journalists.
I want to assume you're joking. The Department of Defense is run like NASA. Probably more so.
And don't give us the "private enterprise does better" argument without proof. We've seen how the aerospace companies handle unmanned flight, and it's not really that impressive. They have plenty of launch failures and mission screw-ups. A good friend (who researchers Mars) is fond of noting that all of the recent Mars failures are basically the fault of Lockheed-Martin, for example.
My guess is that if private enterprise ran manned spaceflight, they'd just shrug at any losses and call it the "cost of doing business". And then they'd probably vote themselves fat bonuses for saving money by not spending it on crew safety. (I don't think I need to give examples of companies doing basically this in other industries.) That's a cynical view, to be sure, and you're welcome to not share it. But if you do want to disagree here, please explain why rather than taking it is an axiom that private business fixes everything.
Exactly so. In his position, he'll be responsible if something does happen, so he'll try to take whatever steps he can to stop it. That's politics. Does it suck? Yeah. Would he be a better man if he could stop just shy of that line every time? Certainly. Is it our jobs (as citizens, but also especially Congress) to stop him? You bet.
What I want to see, however, is that he's making these attempts to assume powers IN OPEN COURT. What got most of us about the Bush Administration wasn't that they had a rather... permissive... view on the Fourth Amendment. It was that they had it in secret and apparently knew full well that they were wrong. (When Qwest asked for warrants for the phone taps, the Justice Department just quietly left, apparently. That tells me that they knew that they didn't have a legal leg to stand on.)
Yet the ancients' circular planetary paths, sans epicycles, more accurately described the reality of elliptical orbits. Ptolemy's theory had more mistakes (geocentrism, circular orbits, epicycles) than the older model (geocentrism and circular orbits) and was therefore a less accurate model of reality, but it was more useful because it better fit the data given his preconceived notions about reality, that is, a geocentric solar system.
I don't really see it that way. Both models are, from all current evidence, intrinsically flawed and I can't see that either one is more flawed. More to the point, at the time they couldn't have known about Kepler's laws (their observational accuracy couldn't have distinguished Kepler and Ptolemy anyway), so how on Earth does one judge based on anything but how accurate the theory is against the current observations?
"More useful" is not a good idea, either. Newton's laws are generally more useful than Relativity since for most applications they're approximately equal and Newton's equations are easier to deal with. But in no sense are Newton's laws currently accepted over Relativity.
On top of that, for a particular application I may approximate even Newton's laws pretty heavily. Again, this doesn't mean we're accepting the approximation over Newton's laws, we're just making use of a useful approximation.
(And as an epicyclic aside: epicycles on circular orbits do, in fact, more closely match Kepler's laws than straight Copernican circles do. In fact, I use that approximation essentially all the time in my rings research. So, again, it's not at all obvious to me why you think circular, geocentric models are more "true" than the Ptolemaic model.)
Actually, they were more accurate. That was the point of Tycho's data and Kepler's predictions about transits of Mercury and Venus. But what had kept the heliocentric model alive all of those years when it wasn't more accurate (actually, I've read that it may have been *less* accurate) was the elegance.
That said, if you have two theories and one is more elegant but matches the data worse, it's rejected (at least until it can be improved upon). All the elegance in the universe isn't worth squat if you don't have accuracy.
I'm not sure I can agree that "better" is clearer that "more accurate". If you need to ask what standard "accurate" is judged by, I can't imagine the standards of "better" are any clearer. ("Better" can, in fact, mean many things. More accurate, more elegant, more in line with our preconceived notion, etc. It's difficult to see what else "more accurate" can mean.)
The catch is, eventually one will be right,
This is, perhaps, a minor quibble with wording. (Depending on what you meant.) But no, neither is likely to be right. One will be shown to be wrong before the other, however. Or, if you prefer, one will probably be more accurate.
Did you read my post at all? A factor of 2 variation in 0.1% of the Sun's total power is irrelevant. You're quibbling about an immaterial detail in the hopes of distracting attention from the main show.
Well, not necessarily. Even at a few percent, I would think it might be measurable.
Still, that's as may be. Point is, we have good reason to think that the CO2 is anthropogenic, as you said. :-)
Uh, what does that fluctuation in that plot prove? The change is less than a W/m^2, if I'm doing my math right (out of a total insolation of 1300 W/m^2) and x-rays and EUV don't make it to the surface of the Earth anyway. (This is why astronomers keep launching those telescopes into space, remember.)
[*] Ok, a pedant might argue that it has some internal degrees of freedom, nuclear hyperfine levels etc, that are irrelevant here.
Actually, you needn't look to such minute differences. Different isotopes do react at slightly different rates, so biological processes often enrich molecules in one isotope over another. I don't know of any way to use this to trace CO2's source, but it has been used to chemically trace the earliest appearances of photosynthesis on Earth, for example.
That said, your post is right: you can reasonably accurately measure and sum the man-made carbon sources.
hat is because you are on the earth with a considerable mass compared to your mass. If you did this experiment of charging yourself up in relation to another object, in a gravity free or gravity neutral environment, you might be surprised how much a small charge can affect the movement of a mass comparable to that of your body.
No, not at all. The acceleration is necessarily the same in both situations. And you're totally dodging the point, which is you're quantization of the intrinsically unquantizable.
Astronomers and astrophysicists have no or very little training into the behavior of electrically charged objects and fields.
And now I'm guessing you don't actually know any astrophysics or know any astrophysicists. I am an astrophysicist. I assure you, we have many graduate classes that are rich in E&M. I, for example, had no fewer than three graduate courses that were basically plasma physics (which is basically applied E&M) in different contexts. Most programs require Jackson E&M, too.
Also, you seem to be confusing "astronomer" with "engineer". It's the latter who would be trying to figure out whether the probes' accelerations are intrinsic or extrinsic. (The voted for the former, last I check. And 1/3 of it, so far, has turned out to be.)
Aaaand, I see you're an Electric Universe person. Never mind, the above isn't meant for you. This discussion is effectively over.
I wasn't saying that the underlying physics can't be the same. I was say that the effects are different. When we find two phenomenon that aren't obviously the same, we give them different names so we can keep them straight. Calling one the other (whether or not you personally suspect that they're related by the underlying cause) is sloppy terminology and confusing.
An electric field, even a very weak one, affects a charged object 36 orders of magnitude more than gravity.
Nonsense. You just quantified something that's not quantifiable. How massive is the test body, whats the charge, what's the strength of the E-field, and what's the size and distance to the larger body? If you're going to pretend to be able to give numbers, you have to give us the whole story. I've often carried a small charge (shuffle your feet on the carpet to try it yourself) and never have I found my weight has noticeably changed.
You can't globally compare forces like that. You can compare them in specific instances, sure. But you can't just wave your hand and claim that one is N times more powerful than another. (Yes, I know people do it. They're wrong.)
The Pioneer probes may have a slight positive charge, which means they would slow down a little more than we would expect by gravity alone.
Without running the numbers to be sure, I'm pretty sure you'd need too much charge for that to work. Electrons are easy to accelerate with an electric field, their charge-to-mass ratio is large. Macroscopic objects like probes and humans have lower charge-to-mass ratios (we tend to be close to charge neutral for obvious reasons) and it takes a much strong field to accelerate us remotely comparably.
The problem with Voyager data is that they course correct using thrusters and so their exact location is more uncertain.
No, not really. The location is what's being measured. The problem with Voyagers is that since they use thrusters, you don't know precisely enough what impulses were applied to them. If you don't know that, you can't remove it from the tracking data to reveal the small anomaly.
Also, if it is frame dragging, it doesn't explain Pioneer very well I can't imagine (being really damn far from any rotating mass and all). Additionally, I don't believe it makes sense to ascribe different instances on the same probe being due to passing Earth with rather than against the rotation: unless the probe is going out in the solar system and then, later back in again, the flyby will have the same orientation, albeit at different distances and latitudes. (On the other hand, you'd expect different effects, but not *zero* effect in one case, no matter what the relationship between the flybys is.)