Posted on 06/26/2007 5:59:25 AM PDT by BGHater
The 'Pioneer anomaly' – the mystifying observation that NASA's two Pioneer spacecraft have drifted far off their expected paths – cannot be explained by tinkering with the law of gravity, a new study concludes.
The study's author suggests an unknown, but conventional, force is instead acting on the spacecraft. But others say even more radical changes to the laws of physics could explain the phenomenon.
Launched in the early 1970s, NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are drifting out of the solar system in opposite directions, gradually slowing down as the Sun's gravity pulls back on them.
But they are slowing down slightly more than expected and no one knows why. Some physicists say the law of gravity itself needs revising, so that gravity retains more strength in the outer solar system. But there has been disagreement about whether such modifications would accurately predict the orbits of the outer planets.
Now, Kjell Tangen, a physicist at the firm DNV in Hovik, Norway, says tweaking the law of gravity in a variety of ways cannot explain the anomaly – while also getting the orbits of the outer planets right. After modifying gravity in ways that would match the Pioneer anomaly, he inevitably got wrong answers for the motion of Uranus and Pluto.
Conventional explanation
(Excerpt) Read more at space.newscientist.com ...
Right up your alley for the Space Ping.
I think these eggheads are way over-thinking this.
Maybe, just maybe, some humans made errors over the past 30+ years? Perhaps?
They just misplaced a decimal point.
Kewl.
Maybe they calculated in miles instead of kilometers, as with the Mars lander.
Maybe there is more friction in ‘empty space’ than they think? (not so empty)
Dumb question...tenth planet?
You betcha!
Bet you its hyperspace!
If Pioneer 10 and 11 are traveling in different directions, a tenth planet can’t be the cause
What kind of human error could cause drifting spacecraft outside the solar system to slow down? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just not seeing a mechanism.
V’ger is learning.
Ort Cloud or W.I.M.P.s?
The one groundbreaking technology needed for future extra-solar system unmanned probes is a J.S. Bell communications device. This technology, based on an oddity of quantum physics, would provide instantaneous communications across vast distances of space. And huge amounts of money are currently being spent to develop it.
It is based on the discovery of a phenomenon (roughly) that twin pairs of particles always spin in a direction with respect to each other, no matter how far they are physically apart. And when you change the spin of one, the spin of the other changes no matter where it is. And no one knows why.
And even if they were communicating with each other somehow, they are doing it faster than the speed of light.
This means that when we send a probe outside of our solar system, commands to it, and the information received back, would be instantaneous, not reliant on the huge delay of communication from the speed of light, or even worse, the signal strength of normal communications.
So we could then build probes that would just look like a steel ball, covered with armor, powered by an ion drive engine for high speed, that would not even open their armor to perform their mission until they were outside the harsh environment of our solar system.
The situation at the Bullet Nebula indicates that simply adjusting the law of gravity will not explain dark matter. Something else is going on.
No, it doesn’t. The physics will have to be adjusted.
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