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The Pioneer Anomaly and its Implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2006

S.G. Turyshev
Affiliation:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
M.M. Nieto
Affiliation:
Theoretical Division (MS-B285), Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
J.D. Anderson
Affiliation:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
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Abstract

The Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deepspace to date. However, their radio-metric tracking data has consistentlyindicated the presence of a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. Thedrift is a blue-shift, uniformly changing with a rate of ~6 × 10-9 Hz/s and can be interpreted as a constant sunward acceleration ofeach particular spacecraft of aP = (8.74 ± 1.33) × 10-10 m/s2. The nature of this anomaly remains unexplained. Here wesummarize our current knowledge of the discovered effect and review some ofthe mechanisms proposed for its explanation. Currently we are preparing forthe analysis of the entire set of the available Pioneer 10/11 Doppler datawhich may shed a new light on the origin of the anomaly. We present apreliminary assessment of such an intriguing possibility.


Type
Research Article
Copyright
© EAS, EDP Sciences, 2006

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