Mysterious Force Holds Back NASA Probe In Deep Space

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 2-10-2002 | Robert Matthews

[Southack]

Acceleration in the opposite direction is also known as deceleration...

[ET(end tyranny)]

Thank you very much! I looked at the original link, but couldn't find the article. Appreciate it!

[Cicero]

It is discouraging that so many FReepers are unable to add constructive thought to a thread like this.

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.

[blam]

Don't know why that linked as it did, try this:Click here

[ventana]

As a side note. This graphic was drawn by Carl Sagan's wife, I forget her name, but she took night classes at the art school I attended way back. I always thought it was cool that she stood a better than average chance of being the longest lasting artist ever.

[blam]

Dang, still didn't work. Okay, go to the linked page and click on International news in full then go to the bottom of that page. It's there. Don't know why it won't link.

[Consort]

I don't want to talk about it.

[DonkeyHodee]

This is a serious and/or critical discovery. It would help us understand the laws of space/time and the effects that they have when the interact outide of certain gravitational and speed effects. This is very... very... very... interesting.

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.

[Gamecock]

Acceleration in the opposite direction is also known as deceleration...

Bump until I can drink a couple Hefe-Weizens and think about that....

[GhostofWCooper]

The fact that the know-it-alls and academicians don't quite know everything sticks in their craws, in a big way.

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.

[cascademountaineer]

Possibly a gravitational wave.

[RightWhale]

Could there be a component of gravity that doesn't follow the inverse square law, but something somewhat less than the inverse square?

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.

[LantzALot]

...more than seven billion miles from Earth.

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.

[VetoBill]

The same mysterious force exists here on earth; I am proof of that. No matter how far I go, what bar I explore, or how 'non-functional' I get... a mysterious force pulls me back to my bed.

I need to conduct further experiments to fully validate this force. Cheers!!!!

[ET(end tyranny)]

Somebody else posted the link. But, thank you for your trouble. International news... silly me, I looked under science, technology... even headlines. Is space international or intergalactic? lol oh well, at least I got the link!

[smallfatcat]

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).

[RightWhale]

This problem has been known a while. It is a problem of the scientific or mathematical type, not an operational or engineering problem.

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.

[blam]

The Great Attractor?

[blam]

"Somebody else posted the link. But, thank you for your trouble. International news... silly me, I looked under science, technology... even headlines. Is space international or intergalactic? lol oh well, at least I got the link!"

LOL. I never did get it right then, I saw Callisto had made the link.

[NC_Libertarian]

Are these the same researchers who trashed one of our Mars probes by mixing up their metric and English measurements? Its a shame to see all that taxpayer money go to waste because somebody didn't do their sums right.

What's $300,000,000 when it's other people's money?