9 Jun
2005
9 Jun
'05
7:20 p.m.
At 12:00 -0500 6/8/05, Bill Dawson wrote (quoted from a website):
"With the spacecraft now silent, we cannot expect
future data,
so we must look to the past. In fact, there are hundreds of
tapes containing data taken before 1987, when the spacecraft
were between 10 and 40 AU from the Sun. This data from the time
the Pioneers were still in the midst of this planetary realm
could be crucial to solving the anomaly.
We can expect future data. The New Horizons
mission should launch in January 2006 and zip by
pluto in July 2015 if all goes well. Of course,
it's not a JPL mission, but the data should be
equally relevant.
Nevertheless, considering the cost/bit of the
Pioneer data, if there is any chance of
recovering it, serious effort should be made to
do so.
FWIW, a paper describing the anomalous acceleration is at
PHYSICAL REVIEW D, VOLUME 65, 082004
Study of the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer 10
and 11 John D. Anderson,1,* Philip A. Laing,2,?
Eunice L. Lau,1,? Anthony S. Liu,3,? Michael
Martin Nieto,4,i
and Slava G. Turyshev1,?
1Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute
of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109
and I have a .pdf copy of that paper, if anyone
is interested (unless, of course, anyone from
Physical Review D asks me not to pass it on).
--
- Mark
210-522-6025, temporary cell 240-375-2995