Scientists reconstruct the Pioneer spacecraft anomaly

scientific american ^ | April 15, 2008 | JR Minkel

[BenLurkin]

Ten years ago, NASA researchers discovered that the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft had fallen slightly behind course during their 35-year journeys to the outer reaches of the solar system. In what has become known as the Pioneer anomaly, which was the subject of one of the talks this weekend at the American Physical Society here in St. Louis, nobody knows for sure why it happened. It probably stemmed from leaking gas or heat.

But there's also the possibility, however remote, that gravity doesn't behave the way we expect. Until recently, researchers haven't had the data to distinguish the different possibilities. That changed in 2006, when NASA physicist Slava Turyshev, a co-discoverer of the anomaly, was visiting a colleague at the NASA Ames Research Center. The Moffett Field, Calif.–facility was about to throw out hundreds of magnetic disks containing the Pioneer telemetric data—temperature and power readings that the twin craft had sent back to NASA once every few minutes until they traveled out of range. (NASA finally lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2003, after 31 years. It had lost contact with Pioneer 11 in 1995.)

Turyshev and his colleagues rescued the data, and Viktor Toth, a computer programmer in Ottawa, Ontario, volunteered to write brand new code that extracted the telemetry readings from the raw 1s and 0s encoded in the magnetic disks.

A group of some 50 researchers, including Turyshev, is now trying to match the data to a detailed computer model of the craft's inner workings. The model is designed to mimic the flow of heat and electricity produced by the craft's generators, which harnessed the heat from radioactive plutonium and turned a fraction of it into electricity to power the craft.

[KoRn]

Recently I read an article(you might have been the one that sent it to me lol) that claimed our Solar System was getting ready to enter into an "Interstellar Cloud", and our space probes were right at the edge of it, with one of them almost into it. Could be playing a role in this.

Images and Movies About the Interaction of the Solar System with the Interstellar Medium

[fanfan]

One might be tempted to believe this solar system was made for us. :-)

[texas booster]

My father helped design true 25-year mag tape for use at CERN, NASA and other projects that would generate enormous data tracks that would take years to decipher.

With the low cost of cloud storage, why couldn't we move this old data out to the cloud, with basic instruction manuals and compilers?

I understand that it might be petabytes of data that needs to be stored, but that just isn't that much money compared to the value of acquiring the data first hand.

And it could be done before all of the people who know the computer languages and formats have all passed on.

As hard as it will be to replace the Pioneer data streams, it is even harder to replace the human ingenuity that created it in the first place.

[PIF]

“With the low cost of cloud storage, why couldn't we move this old data out to the cloud, with basic instruction manuals and compilers?”

We could... good idea. However, you will have to drag many of the old timers out of assisted living or retirement homes. The manuals are likely in some used book store. The tricks of the trade only the old timers knew... and those aren't in the books.

Then there are huge amounts of photo negatives and films that are stored some where or are in the process of being thrown out, or erased. Legend has it there are high def films taken during the landings, but never released (the low-res TV in those days would not have shown any new info) and so have been lost or destroyed.

There was a recent case of this (not the one in the story) dealing with lunar data from the Apollo days. Most was erased before anyone thought to save it.

[Eaker]

Is there anything Star Trek can’t do?

[texas booster]

Somewhere in an old house that we lived in is a complete set of repair manuals to an IBM 360 that I worked on. Came home with me when the mainframe died (for good), but they were so heavy that I left them in the attic (I think). Probably still there.

The wetware behind the Apollo program and the early exploration programs was the key component. Russian mathematicians did incredible things with substandard hardware and got some good interstellar information. The West had better hardware and a much easier time making sense of pure science.

Knowing the challenges that face us in this endeavor, I still would think that we could copy the raw data to the cloud, along with basic manuals, before the old retirees all pass on.

It could work, at least as an on line museum.

[The Comedian]

Is there anything Star Trek can’t do?

Not really, no.

Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.