Personally, I'm still going with "tractor beam" as the explanation.
Posted on 12/16/2010 10:38:08 PM PST by ErnstStavroBlofeld
Thirty years ago, NASA scientists noticed that two of their spacecraft, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, were veering off course slightly, as if subject to a mysterious, unknown force. In 1998, the wider scientific community got wind of that veering—termed the Pioneer anomaly—and took aim at it with incessant, mind-blowingly detailed scrutiny that has since raised it to the physics equivalent of cult status. Now, though, after spawning close to 1000 academic papers, numerous international conferences, and many entire scientific careers, this beloved cosmic mystery may be on its way out.
Slava Turyshev, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and Viktor Toth, a Canada-based software developer, plan to publish the results of their strikingly comprehensive new analysis of the Pioneer anomaly in the next few months. Their work is likely to bring a conclusion to one of the longest and most tumultuous detective stories of modern astrophysics.
NASA launched Pioneer 10 in the spring of 1972 and Pioneer 11 one year later. The spacecraft's joint mission was to gather information about the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (in the case of Pioneer 11), and their moons. As they hurtled past those various celestial objects, the probes measured previously unknown properties of their atmospheres and surfaces; they also photographed Jupiter’s Red Spot and Saturn’s rings up close for the first time. Then, after completing their "flyby" missions in the mid-1970s, the Pioneers kept going. Carrying identical plaques depicting a man and a woman, the atomic transition of hydrogen, and the location of our planet within the galaxy—a message to aliens—the probes became the first manmade objects ever to plunge beyond the solar system into the inconceivable cold and dark of interstellar space
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
Ping
Interesting read
Probably relevant:
http://wbabin.net/mathis/mathis.htm
[ Correcting a = v^2/r (Orbital velocity) ]
Man...there’s some smart people out there...
http://preview.tinyurl.com/3xv89tb
The UN has tried previously to contact alien life. The two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 carried a message from Kurt Waldheim, then secretary-general, saying: “We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship.”
However, scientists are now embarrassed by Mr Waldheim’s deployment as an interstellar envoy because it later emerged that he had been an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party.
Sometimes anomalies produce bright new directions and findings in science. Unfortunately this time, it is turning out to be rather mundane.
LOL.
Interesting. Thanks for posting.
Oh great... we gave the alien invaders a road map to our planet?! Sheesh..
"oh, and also a new tax payer base to screw..."
Don’t kid yourself. These are the kinds of people that castrate themselves and go looking for the mother ship behind the comet.
“Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.” ~~ Ming the Merciless
...whats starts out as an interesting article turns into another that assumes “dark energy” has been proven to exist as fact...instead of theory as it still is.
=8-(
I agree with you.Its slowly being accepted as observational tools such as the Hubble Telescope is proving it exists. It seems that gravitational lensing is as very good indicator.
I don’t buy it. You can’t keep a good MOND down.
Funny, I thought the same thing. Those NASA people act too liberal at times, as if there's nothing out there in that big universe that could possibly hurt us.
We're in trouble. They'll either come for our naked women (or maybe men) or they'll come after us for sending porno into their neighborhood.
“Our scientists have determined this to be chicken. Thanks for the map.”
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