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".
There's not enough real information in the article for useful speculation, IMHO. For instance, is the deceleration absolutely constant, or is the margin of error too great to be certain of that? Have they eliminated cosmic dust? Could it be explained by the gravitational field from a dark star? Probably not, if reputable scientists can't find a reasonable explanation. But these scientists would be working with a ton of mathematical data and measurements that the article doesn't give in detail.
Think of it as training wheels. The intelligent aliens made sure humans won't get out into deep space before Mankind becomes civilized. Certainly they had to find some way to stop "I Love Lucy" from getting their too with all those all advertisements. Find that and my theory will be proven.
Bump until I can drink a couple Hefe-Weizens and think about that....
Heck, it could be something like time-dilation affecting the instruments or just the awful cold of deep space throwing the computer out of whack. They don't have radar bouncing off this little gizmo, they just try to triangulate on it with radio dishes. They find an error in it's calculated position so tiny it amounts to 6 mph in a century, so it's out of position by a couple thousand miles or less, out of a billion and a half! Their radio dishes might be in error by that much...
Whatever is causing it, a little humble pie is good for these guys.
Or, perhaps there is a dispersed gravity source within the solar system that hasn't been noticed yet, not a planet, but a cloud of matter, gas possibly.
Perhaps it is electrostatic in nature, the ship could have picked up a large charge by now.
I don't know.
I always had a gut feel that calculations which relied on the speed of light or square of the distance worked fine while we were able only to apply them to terrestrial situations. Now that we're getting into bigger numbers, maybe we'll discover it's really only .99999999999 times the square of the distance.
I need to conduct further experiments to fully validate this force. Cheers!!!!
Or perhaps radio waves don't travel at the speed of light forever. Maybe they slow down by 6 mph every 100 years
I think that would make the probe appear to accelerate away from us as the radio waves would take longer to reach us and would therefore suggest that the probe was further away than it actually was (assuming you used the 'old' speed of light in your calculations).
It really doesn't matter where the ship goes now, or when it gets there. Sagan has his monument, and I am happy his wife got to work on the design.
Cosmologists haven't tackled it yet, apparently. The scope isn't cosmic, just something in our backyard.
Still, as others have mentioned, there appears to be something going on that our wonderful physics hasn't accounted for. Who knows, it might be important, although it seems like a small effect, an impact to the gravity constant way down in the less significant digits.
LOL. I never did get it right then, I saw Callisto had made the link.
What's $300,000,000 when it's other people's money?
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