Study of the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11

By J. Anderson, P. A. Laing, E. Lau, A. Liu, Michael Martin Nieto, S. Turyshev. 2001

590 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Our previous analyses of radio Doppler and ranging data from distant spacecraft in the solar system indicated that an apparent anomalous acceleration is acting on Pioneer 10 and 11, with a magnitude a_P ~ 8 x 10^{-8} cm/s^2, directed towards the Sun (anderson,moriond). Much effort has been expended looking for possible systematic origins of the residuals, but none has been found. A detailed investigation of effects both external to and internal to the spacecraft, as well as those due to modeling and computational techniques, is provided. We also discuss the methods, theoretical models, and experimental techniques used to detect and study small forces acting on interplanetary spacecraft. These include the methods of radio Doppler data collection, data editing, and data reduction. There is now further data for the Pioneer 10 orbit determination. The extended Pioneer 10 data set spans 3 January 1987 to 22 July 1998. [For Pioneer 11 the shorter span goes from 5 January 1987 to the time of loss of coherent data on 1 October 1990.] With these data sets and more detailed studies of all the systematics, we now give a result, of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^{-8} cm/s^2. (Annual/diurnal variations on top of a_P, that leave a_P unchanged, are also reported and discussed.)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/153072f8e721fb2f599a3dcf431650a74ff10aae

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Citations in the corpus

The phenomenology of Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati cosmologies (2005, background): “8One should also note that DGP gravity cannot explain the famous Pioneer anomaly [74].”
Photon and graviton mass limits (2008, background): “With the caveats of a few so-far unexplained anomalies (Pioneer (185; 186), flyby (187; 188), variation of the AU with time (189)), there have been no unambiguous positive results.”
Dark matter versus modifications of the gravitational inverse-square law: results from planetary motion in the Solar system (2006, background): “In fact, effects on orbits of inner and outer planets would be large enough to have been detected given the present levels of accuracy (Anderson et al. 2002; Iorio 2006b; Sanders 2006).”
Influence of global cosmological expansion on local dynamics and kinematics (2008, background): “as any inﬂuence on the local dynamics and kinematics within the Solar System has recently also attracted increasing attention in connection with the so-called ‘PioneerAnomaly’ (Anderson et al., 1998; Anderson et al., 2002; Markwardt, 2002; Nieto and Turyshev, 2004; Turyshev et al., 2005a,b), hencefo”
Solar system effects in Schwarzschild de Sitter space time (2006, background): “itional gravitational Yukawa potential [6], for example2. More recently brane–world models are considered as modiﬁed–gravity theories in this context [8]. 1A possible exception is the Pioneer anomaly [3]. 2Another idea is to modify the Newtonian dynamics [7]. 1 We here consider the gravitational ﬁel”
A Bird's Eye View of f (R)-Gravity (2009, background): “Besides, an apparent, anomalous, long-range acceleration in the data analysis of the Pioneer 10/11, Galileo, and Ulysses spacecrafts could be framed in a general theoretical scheme by taking into account corrections to the Newtonian potential [53].”