I heard that by order of the attourney general, NASA will be updating future probes by placing curtains over their plaques.
Posted on 02/09/2002 6:34:49 PM PST by blam
As if my occasional D&D posts haven't already labelled me as a hopeless nerd, I feel obliged to correct this. The correct name is "V'ger". The "oya" on the probe's plaque had gotten corroded, and these were the only letters visible, so the alien intelligence thought that the probe was named "V'ger"
I find it to be as good an explanation as any. Despite being a voracious consumer of almost every sci fi novel ever written, and a doc who minored in evolution in undergrad, I never thought the Big Guy would let us muck up any other pristine planets with our human-ness ;-) Curved space makes sense to me.
ANOMALOUS GRAVITATIONAL FORCE? A discussion of this phenomenon appears in the 4 October 1999 issue of Newsweek magazine (See also the December 1998 issue of Scientific American.) The mystery of the tiny unexplained acceleration towards the sun in the motion of the Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11 and Ulysses spacecraft remains unexplained. A team of planetary scientists and physicists led by John Anderson (Pioneer 10 Principal Investigator for Celestial Mechanics) has identified a tiny unexplained acceleration towards the sun in the motion of the Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and Ulysses spacecraft. The anomalous acceleration - about 10 billion times smaller than the acceleration we feel from Earth's gravitational pull - was identified after detailed analyses of radio data from the spacecraft. A variety of possible causes were considered including: perturbations from the gravitational attraction of planets and smaller bodies in the solar system; radiation pressure, the tiny transfer of momentum when photons impact the spacecraft; general relativity; interactions between the solar wind and the spacecraft; possible corruption to the radio Doppler data; wobbles and other changes in Earth's rotation; outgassing or thermal radiation from the spacecraft; and the possible influence of non-ordinary or dark matter. After exhausting the list of explanations deemed most plausible, the researchers examined possible modification to the force of gravity as explained by Newton's law with the sun being the dominant gravitational force. "Clearly, more analysis, observation, and theoretical work are called for," the researchers concluded. The scientists expect the explanation when found will involve conventional physics.Pioneer 10 will continue into interstellar space, heading generally for the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of Taurus (The Bull). Aldebaran is about 68 light years away and it will take Pioneer over 2 million years to reach it.
I heard that by order of the attourney general, NASA will be updating future probes by placing curtains over their plaques.
Or perhaps radio waves don't travel at the speed of light forever. Maybe they slow down by 6 mph every 100 years.
That sort of thing might not be detected until you had a few probes a great distance from this planet.
On another note: isn't it wild that the U.S. has been sending probes into deep space for over thirty years?!
Three decades later most nations on this planet haven't even figured nuclear power out, much less how to send atomic-powered probes into the far reaches of space.
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