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Science Pioneer Anomaly partially explained with heat
Science Pioneer Anomaly partially explained with heat | Pioneer Anomaly partially explained with heat |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Monday, 05 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 The Pioneer Explorer Collaboration (PEC) is a coordinated effort by many scientists and engineers to analyze all available historical data from the two Pioneer spacecraft with regards to the Pioneer Anomaly. Over the past many years The Planetary Society, under the auspices of the PEC, have been collecting data on the two Pioneer missions in order to analyze it with the hope of understanding what is going on with the Pioneer Anomaly. The data includes reams of radio Doppler and ranging data that provide velocity and distance of the spacecraft, along with various other information about the spacecraft such as temperatures. The budget of the project is tight. In fact, Turyshev isn’t even paid for his work. He stated to Space.com, “I have been working on [the Pioneer anomaly] for more than 11 years now, and was never funded to do this job. I guess this says a lot about my devotion to solve this mystery." {Space.com: “The Problem with Gravity: New Mission Would Probe Strange Puzzle”] Turyshev works for JPL in the area of gravitational research, but not specifically for the work of the Pioneer Anomaly. So, he works on it in his spare time. And, the American Physical Society has gathered the data from the Pioneer spacecraft primarily with donations from its members and other space buffs. In April 2008, Slava Turyshev used tracking and telemetry data from one hundred different measurements on the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, including the varied temperatures within the spacecraft caused by the different metals and materials used to build the spacecraft. The spacecraft is made with such materials as Teflon, aluminum, Mylar, aluminum-based paints, Kapton. The plutonium, which provides power for the spacecraft, also generates heat. The team found that Pioneer 11 gives off more heat in certain directions than it does in other directions. The varied rates of heat emissions on the spacecraft are large enough to force the spacecraft off of its nominal trajectory. The exhaustive analysis performed by the Turyshev team suggests that ordinary heat emission from the spacecraft can, at least, partly explain the slower than expected speeds of the twin probes. At the meeting of the American Physical Society, which was held in St. Louis, Missouri (U.S.A.), Turyshev described, on April 13, 2008, their efforts to build a computer model of the heat flow within the spacecraft. The resulting computer model matches the measured temperatures of both Pioneer spacecraft within three degrees (Celsius) at each of the one hundred points of measurements. The heat given off by the spacecraft, thus, accounts for 28 to 36% of the Pioneer Anomaly. However, what about the rest of the Pioneer Anomaly--how can it be explained? More on the next page. |
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