# A route to understanding of the Pioneer anomaly

 dc.contributor.author Turyshev, Slava en_US dc.contributor.author Nieto, Michael en_US dc.contributor.author Anderson, John en_US dc.date.accessioned 2006-06-20T19:19:38Z en_US dc.date.available 2006-06-20T19:19:38Z en_US dc.date.issued 2004-12-13 en_US dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1850/2043 en_US dc.description "A Route to Understanding of the Pioneer Anomaly," Proceedings of the 22nd Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics. Held at Standford University: Standford, California: 13-17 December 2004. AND also archived at: arXiv:gr-qc/0503021 v1 4 Mar 2005 en_US dc.description.abstract The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deep space to date. However, while at heliocentric distance of $\sim$ 20--70 AU, the accuracies of their orbit reconstructions were limited by a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. This drift can be interpreted as a sunward constant acceleration of $a_P = (8.74 \pm 1.33)\times 10^{-8}$ cm/s$^2$ which is now commonly known as the Pioneer anomaly. Here we discuss the Pioneer anomaly and present the next steps towards understanding of its origin. They are: 1) Analysis of the entire set of existing Pioneer 10 and 11 data, obtained from launch to the last telemetry received from Pioneer 10, on 27 April 2002, when it was at a heliocentric distance of 80 AU. This data could yield critical new information about the anomaly. If the anomaly is confirmed, 2) Development of an instrumental package to be operated on a deep space mission to provide an independent confirmation on the anomaly. If further confirmed, 3) Development of a deep-space experiment to explore the Pioneer anomaly in a dedicated mission with an accuracy for acceleration resolution at the level of $10^{-10}$ cm/s$^2$ in the extremely low frequency range. In Appendices we give a summary of the Pioneer anomaly's characteristics, outline in more detail the steps needed to perform an analysis of the entire Pioneer data set, and also discuss the possibility of extracting some useful information from the Cassini mission cruise data. (Refer to PDF file for exact formulas.) en_US dc.description.sponsorship The work of SGT and JDA was carried out at en_US the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. MMN acknowledges support by the U.S. Department of Energy. dc.format.extent 500476 bytes en_US dc.format.mimetype application/pdf en_US dc.language.iso en_US en_US dc.publisher Stanford University en_US dc.relation RIT Scholars content from RIT Digital Media Library has moved from http://ritdml.rit.edu/handle/1850/2043 to RIT Scholar Works http://scholarworks.rit.edu/other/160, please update your feeds & links! dc.subject Doppler frequency drift en_US dc.subject Pioneer anomaly en_US dc.title A route to understanding of the Pioneer anomaly en_US dc.type Proceedings en_US

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