Wasn't the spacecraft-solid rocket stack spin stabilized for the duration of the rocket's burn during Jupiter injection or was it also in 3-axis stabilization mode? I would have figured delivery errors would be minimized by spinning up first.

Another possible problem with spin-stabilizing is the star sensor, would it be able to cope with starfield smearing during rotation?

Can New Horizons participate in this experiment?  Or was that another item left off the menu?

The Pioneers are spin-stabilized spacecraft. The Voyagers are three-axis stabilized craft that fire thrusters to maintain their orientation in space or to slew around and point their instruments. Those thruster firings would introduce uncertainties in the tracking data that would overwhelm any effect as small as that occurring with Pioneer.

This difference in the way the spacecraft are stabilized actually is one of the reasons the Pioneer data are so important and unique. Most current spacecraft are three-axis stabilized, not spin stabilized. It is unlikely another spin-stabilized craft will be sent across the solar system in the foreseeable future.

That's an unfair and unjustified jab at the mission.

No - it cant, because it uses thrusters to manouver which would impart a small, but hard to calculate delta-V every time the spacecraft pitches, rolls and yaws.  Same reason that Voyager is of no use either.

activities during the approximately 8-year cruise to Pluto include annual spacecraft and instrument checkouts, trajectory corrections, instrument calibrations and Pluto encounter rehearsals.

Then again, they're planning a yearly checkout iirc though - and that may involved pitching/rolling/yawing the spacecraft to look at astronomical calibration targets, which would trash the effect wouldnt it?

Yes, we spin most of cruise, stopping only rarely. It costs fuel that we want to hoard for encounters and KBO DeltaV. And yes, our radio science team hopes to look for
the Pioneer anaomaly. Contact Len Tyler or Ivan Linscott at Stanford.

-Alan

Alan addressed this back in Feb 05 in the "New Horizons, Pluto and the Kuiper belt" page.  It seems like he plans to take full advantage of this opportunity.

[Slava] Turyshev introduced the possibility of working with New Horizons, NASA’s Pluto-Kuiper belt mission scheduled to launch on January 11, 2006. The Pioneer anomaly investigation team was invited to come up with a thermal model of the New Horizons spacecraft. New Horizons was developed very rapidly on a very small budget. New Horizons was developed so quickly in order to catch the small launch period that is available to get a Jupiter fly by on the way to Pluto, which cuts flight time by a few years.

New Horizons is a great mission for us to look at; they have a spin-stabilized craft, the Doppler data will be very good (not as good as Cassini, but better than Pioneer), and it will be going out to Pluto (remember we found the Pioneer anomaly at the distance of Saturn)! As Turyshev put it, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Sounds great, right?! Unfortunately, the funding for New Horizons is already limited and we will have to bring our own funding, as well as figuring out the study itself.  So, time will tell if this works out.

Might have been a pigment of my imagination... 

Merek Chertkow's report on the 2005 Pioneer Anomaly Conference
"Turyshev and John Anderson, also of JPL, with financial support from The Planetary Society were able to save this additional information from simply being thrown in the dumpster! I know what you must be thinking! I can’t believe it either!"

Sorry, but what is this anomaly about?
( I'm a Newbie asking too many questions  )

Another cool tidbit: there is one last opportunity to attempt to contact Pioneer 10, coming up in this February/March.  (They think that, just barely maybe there is enough power still now in the old RTGs...) The round-trip light-time is 25 hours, so the contact would proceed by sending out a signal from Goldstone, waiting a day while the earth spins around once and the radio waves make their merry way, and listening for a response again at Goldstone.  Somehow that image amuses me :^)