01-02-2005, 02:09 AM
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Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 1,344
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Gravity: It ain't classic g-force anymore.
From the LA Times via Yahoo.
Quote:
"I started plotting this anomalous acceleration toward the sun," Anderson said. In space science-speak, that meant the spacecraft were improbably slowing down.
To be sure, the anomaly was small, just 8 X 10--8 centimeters/second2. That amounted to about 8,000 miles a year, a tiny fraction of the 219 million miles the spacecraft covered annually. The anomaly is about 10 billion times weaker than the Earth's gravity.
But over time, even inches and meters add up.
Today, after three decades, the difference is about 248,000 miles, the distance from Earth to the moon.
Anderson, ever the cautious scientist, didn't tell anyone what he was seeing for a decade. Early on, the probes were still so close to the sun that he reasoned radiation and solar wind — streams of ionized gas spewing forth through the solar system — could be affecting them.
The other possibility was a spacecraft "systematic" — an onboard mechanical problem. Prime suspects were gas leaks, along with releases of energy by the plutonium-powered radioisotope thermoelectric generators that provided electric power to the instruments.
None of these candidates seemed capable of producing errors as large as Anderson was charting.
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