Posted on 02/09/2002 6:34:49 PM PST by blam
Mysterious force holds back Nasa probe in deep space
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent
(Filed: 10/02/2002)
A SPACE probe launched 30 years ago has come under the influence of a force that has baffled scientists and could rewrite the laws of physics.
Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.
Dr Philip Laing, a member of the research team tracking the craft, said: "We have examined every mechanism and theory we can think of and so far nothing works.
"If the effect is real, it will have a big impact on cosmology and spacecraft navigation," said Dr Laing, of the Aerospace Corporation of California.
Pioneer 10 was launched by Nasa on March 2 1972, and with Pioneer 11, its twin, revolutionised astronomy with detailed images of Jupiter and Saturn. In June 1983, Pioneer 10 passed Pluto, the most distant planet in our solar system.
Both probes are now travelling at 27,000mph towards stars that they will encounter several million years from now. Scientists are continuing to monitor signals from Pioneer 10, which is more than seven billion miles from Earth.
Research to be published shortly in The Physical Review, a leading physics journal, will show that the speed of the two probes is being changed by about 6 mph per century - a barely-perceptible effect about 10 billion times weaker than gravity.
Scientists initially suspected that gas escaping from tiny rocket motors aboard the probes, or heat leaking from their nuclear power plants might be responsible. Both have now been ruled out. The team says no current theories explain why the force stays constant: all the most plausible forces, from gravity to the effect of solar radiation, decrease rapidly with distance.
The bizarre behaviour has also eliminated the possibility that the two probes are being affected by the gravitational pull of unknown planets beyond the solar system.
Assertions by some scientists that the force is due to a quirk in the Pioneer probes have also been discounted by the discovery that the effect seems to be affecting Galileo and Ulysses, two other space probes still in the solar system. Data from these two probes suggests the force is of the same strength as that found for the Pioneers.
Dr Duncan Steel, a space scientist at Salford University, says even such a weak force could have huge effects on a cosmic scale. "It might alter the number of comets that come towards us over millions of years, which would have consequences for life on Earth. It also raises the question of whether we know enough about the law of gravity."
Until 1988, Pioneer 10 was the most remote object made by man - a distinction now held by Voyager 1. Should Pioneer 10 make contact with alien life, it carries a gold-plated aluminium plaque on which the figures of a man and woman are shown to scale, along with a map showing its origin that Nasa calls "the cosmic equivalent of a message in a bottle".
I always wondered how a machine based society/intelligence that lived so far from earth could read enough english and annunciate the letters correctly to come up with "Vger" with the letters painted on the side of the spacecraft. I mean, how did they know that the scribbling was even a language, and not some form of competition stripes??
It was amazing that the visible letters were pronounced correctly in the first place. :-)
My best guess is that the winds have changed from NW and are now Southerly winds at 15 (bunch of zeros) to 20 (many more zeros) mph creating the drag.
So mankind is being quarantined.
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v81/i14/p2858_1
How did Voyager get farther out? Was it launched at a higher rate of speed, or did Pioneer 10 spend more time orbiting planets, or what?
That's known as the tired light theory. However, spectral emission and absorption lines from distant stars and nearby starts arrive on the same wavelenghts. If light slowed down with time, the arriving wavelengths would all be longer, and therefore all the spectral lines shifted for the more distant stars. There is no hint of that. Therefore light doesn't get tired or slow down with age.
Yep. We don't even know enough to be dangerous yet.
I have also heard that our little neck of the interstellar woods is remarkable free of such stuff. Gives us great views into space and apparently we can thank two fairly recent and close super nova for the excellant visibility. Shock waves from the explosions apparently blew all the normal interstellar gas and dust out of our neighborhood.
The views might be great but the bad news is that the relative lack of interstellar gas in our region might be a future obstacle to bringing our Ramscoop Technology online.
Nope - that only lasts 8 years & coincides with the election cycle
Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my cloths...
Thanks for the ping. I am strangely attracted to this thread.
My thoughts exactly.
Funny that these guys would assume that our understanding of the laws of physics is way off before they consider the possibilty that we may have slightly mismeasured or miscalculated the density of matter in the region. Or the gravitational pull of the solar system en masse as the vehicles become more distant. Or the flux of matter moving into the solar system.
One ten-billionth the force of gravity is more likely rounding error in computations than anything else. Or how about accumulation of mass on the probes due to collisions with microparticles?
Al Gore invented Pioneer...
Maybe these is something to that giant sucking sound Ross Perot was babbling on about...
"Very funny, Scotty. Now turn the tractor beam OFF."
It's either the 6% tax congress put on them for renouncing their citizenship or Hillary Care's impuded rent tax pulling them towards the National Treasury.
Maybe it's that Brown Dwarf Art Bells been talking about re Hillary.
An a** that massive
This is obviously due to cosmic warming.
I believe this effect can be blamed on Enron!
no, i believe that would have been gary coleman.
JESUS is coming and he aint happy.
Global warming?
Etceteras.
Well, duh (as the old joke goes), if that's the case - go at night.
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