Pioneer [gravitational] anomaly put to the test

Physics World ^ | September 2004 | Slava Turyshev and John Anderson

[PatrickHenry]

Underlining added by your humble poster.

[PatrickHenry]

Science list Ping! This is an elite subset of the Evolution list.
See the list's description in my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail me to be added or dropped.

[2banana]

Probably because they used a Hp-15 back in the day...

[Mr. Jeeves]

The only other possibility is the existence of new physics.

Or Romulan scans. ;)

[cvq3842]

This might be over my head but I'm glad you posted. I'll bookmark for later. :)

[Nowhere Man]

Spacehead bump!!!!!!

[Red Badger]

Gaseous anomalies in the Neutral Zone?......

[<1/1,000,000th%]

I believe that this effect was confirmed during one of Cassini's earth flybys.

[spokeshave]

Cracked dilithium crystal.....................?

[ProudVet77]

Gaseous anomalies in the Neutral Zone?......

That's what you get for letting defensive linemen eat chile before the game.

[Shryke]

Very interesting PH. I've always had a soft spot for guys that design and launch satellites, just for the almost-immediate obsolescence issue. Must be very frustrating knowing that, by the time your bird gets to where you want it, it's many years behind your current technology.

[GOPJ]

What if gravity isn't weak or consistent?

Some of these theories suggest that gravity might attract a little harder than expected at large distances or small accelerations, so the concept of dark matter may not even be necessary.

[GeraldP]

Is it possible/likely that the acceleration towards the sun could have been the result of a prolonged encounter with an asteroid, whose orbit took it close enough to Pioneer to affect its path.

[Red Badger]

Maybe the COWBOYS can take note for tonight's game!!!!!FALSE STARTS, Indeed!....

[Red Badger]

It needs GRAVITAS!......

[RightWhale]

It's over the heads of most, but this phenomenon will lead to some modification of physical theory.

[r9etb]

OK ... first off, we've got a couple of authors whose main purpose would seem to be to garner funding for their pet mission. Then we have this:

Attempts to test the anomaly using other spacecraft such as Galileo and the Voyager probes have proved unsuccessful,

First off, let's be clear what these guys are talking about: the trajectory determination process has shown what appears to be an unexplained perturbation. Apparently the same perturbation has not been noted with Voyager.

Note that the data in question here are tracking data gathered using Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

While it's entirely possible that they're observing some real effect, the apparent lack of corroborating data for other deep space probes suggests to me that there's a subtle error somewhere in the ground system -- probably in the databases used for Pioneer trajectory processing.

It is not clear why the authors have tossed Galileo into this -- it was a Jupiter orbiter, far closer to the sun than the Pioneers and Voyagers, and its perturbation environment was much different. The effect, if real, is being detected outside the solar system.

My bet: it's something stupid and overlooked on the ground. It almost always is.

[ProudVet77]

But on the other hand it might become a false end of play whistle.

[spodefly]

Since 1998 astronomers have known that the space probes Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 are following trajectories that cannot be explained by conventional physics. Launched in 1972 and 1973, respectively, to explore the outer planets, the Pioneer craft are now at the edge of the solar system, with Pioneer 10 being some 86 astronomical units (about 13 billion kilometres) from the Sun. But they are not quite where they should be, based on the gravitational pull of the known bodies in the solar system.

The tragectories have been effected by cloaked Romulin vessels observing us from the edge of the solar system.

[RobRoy]

The answer is obvious. Our Solar System is a gigantic Dyson sphere and all the galaxies Hubble is exposing is actually just some of the fancier porch lights of people who live on it's surface.

The really cool thing is that the entire Dyson sphere is actually haning in a mobile in Gods family room.