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".
Nonesense; just think of yourself as being the scientific equivalent to Gracie Allen. You get to "set up" the punchlines. Without you asking good questions, we wouldn't hear all those great answers.
Now, say good night, Gracie.....
Thanks. I feel much better now.
Damn! It took me a minute or two.........Hahahhahahahahaha!
Could be that we're surrounded by water:
Genesis
1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Can't wait to see what the big minds come up with.
A Mercury probe picks up speed from the sun's gravity as it heads inward. After passing Mercury, it ends up in a new orbit around the sun (most likely an eccentric orbit that stretches approximately from Mercury's orbit to Earth's orbit).
As interstellar atoms are ionized, they are “picked up” by the solar wind plasma and swept out to the heliosphere’s termination shock. Since these pickup ions are products of the interaction between the solar wind and the neutral atoms of the interstellar medium.
There, a small percentage of these ions are accelerated to cosmic ray energies and then propagate back into the inner heliosphere where they are observed as "anomalous cosmic rays." This process has recently been confirmed by the observervation on AMPTE and Ulysses that anomalous cosmic rays are, indeed, singly ionized
These anomalous cosmic rays return to the inner solar system where some are captured by the earth’s magnetosphere. In other words, these particles zip back and forth through the heliosphere: They are blown into the solar system as interstellar neutral atoms, blown out to the termination shock as pickup ions and then returned to the inner solar system as anomalous cosmic rays.
The elemental composition of interstellar clouds is much like that of the sun, about 90 percent hydrogen and 9.99 percent helium. The heavier elements make up the remaining 0.01 percent.
The heliosphere is probably well represented as stagnation point flow occuring between the solar wind and an interstellar wind. The resulting configuration is similar to the Earth's magnetosphere. Inside the heliopause, the solar wind passes through a termination shock that is elongated in the downstream direction and which is moving back and forth at speeds up to 100 km/s.
Now we know that there must be an outside force acting on Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Are the two Voyageer probes experiencing the same phenomena? I noticed that the Ulysses and Galeleo are also experiencing the same behavior . I think the chaos theory comes into play right about now.
Gotta get some shut eye. Let me know if you hear of anything else pertaining to this.
Check my links from post # 105. :)
Has Nasa adjusted their data to account for Oprah's recent weight gain?
That has to be the most cogent reply on this thread!
Actually just the opposite is true, beyond the pulling of hair kind of thing. If everything were known and understood, there'd be nothing more for them to do. Data that does not fit current theories is the stuff new theories are made out of. Also new Nobel prizes and such of course.
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