Research articles

search articles

My Pages

Stat

Members: 3645
Articles: 2'504'585
Articles rated: 2609

24 April 2024

» arxiv » gr-qc/0506139

Article overview

A Mission to Explore the Pioneer Anomaly
The Pioneer Explorer Collaboration: H. Dittus ; S.G. Turyshev ; C. Lämmerzahl ; S. Theil ; R. Foerstner ; U. Johann ; W. Ertmer ; E. Rasel ; B. Dachwald ; W. Seboldt ; F.W. Hehl ; C. Kiefer ; H.-J. Blome ; J. Kunz ; D. Giulini ; R. Bingham ; B. Kent ; T.J. Sumner ; O. Bertolami ; J. Páramos ; J.L. Rosales ; B. Christophe ; B. Foulon ; P. Touboul ; P. Bouyer ; S. Reynaud ; A. Brillet ; F. Bondu ; E. Samain ; C.J. de Matos ; C. Erd ; J.C. Grenouilleau ; D. Izzo ; A. Rathke ; J.D. Anderson ; S.W. Asmar ; E.L. Lau ; M.M. Nieto ; B. Mashhoon ;
Date:	30 Jun 2005
Subject:	gr-qc
Abstract:	The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deep space to date. These spacecraft had exceptional acceleration sensitivity. However, analysis of their radio-metric tracking data has consistently indicated that at heliocentric distances of $sim 20-70$ astronomical units, the orbit determinations indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. The drift is a blue-shift, uniformly changing with a rate of $sim(5.99 pm 0.01) imes 10^{-9}$ Hz/s, which can be interpreted as a constant sunward acceleration of each particular spacecraft of $a_P = (8.74 pm 1.33) imes 10^{-10} { m m/s^2}$. This signal has become known as the Pioneer anomaly. The inability to explain the anomalous behavior of the Pioneers with conventional physics has contributed to growing discussion about its origin. There is now an increasing number of proposals that attempt to explain the anomaly outside conventional physics. This progress emphasizes the need for a new experiment to explore the detected signal. Furthermore, the recent extensive efforts led to the conclusion that only a dedicated experiment could ultimately determine the nature of the found signal. We discuss the Pioneer anomaly and present the next steps towards an understanding of its origin. We specifically focus on the development of a mission to explore the Pioneer Anomaly in a dedicated experiment conducted in deep space.
Source:	arXiv, gr-qc/0506139
Services:	Forum \| Review \| PDF \| Favorites

No review found.

Did you like this article?

This article or document is ...
important:
of broad interest:
readable:
new:
correct:
Global appreciation:

Note: answers to reviews or questions about the article must be posted in the forum section.
Authors are not allowed to review their own article. They can use the forum section.

browser Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)

ScienXe.org
» my Online CV
» Free

News, job offers and information for researchers and scientists:

home

contact

sitemap