## Presentations and other scholarship

#### Title

A mission to explore the Pioneer anomaly

#### Description

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 $\sim(5.99 \pm 0.01)\times 10^{-9}$ Hz/s, which can be interpreted as a constant sunward acceleration of each particular spacecraft of $a_P = (8.74 \pm 1.33)\times 10^{-10} {\rm m/s^2}$. 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. (Refer to PDF files for exact formulas.)

4-19-2005

"A Mission to Explore the Pioneer Anomaly," Proceedings of the 2005 ESLAB Symposium "Trends in Space Science and Cosmic Vision 2020." Held at ESTEC: Noordwijk, The Netherlands: 19-21 April 2005. AND Also archived at: arXiv:gr-qc/0506139 v1 30 Jun 2005 The work of SGT and JDA was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in February 2014.

#### Document Type

Conference Proceeding

#### Department, Program, or Center

School of Physics and Astronomy (COS)

#### Campus

RIT – Main Campus

COinS