The Pioneer Anomaly Options

[remcook]

http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/pioneer_anomaly_faq.html

The planetary society may be checking it out...

The Planetary Society has committed to raise the funds to preserve the priceless Pioneer data from destruction.


After years of analysis, but without a final conclusion, NASA, astonishingly, gave up trying to solve the "Pioneer Anomaly" and provided no funds to analyze the data. The Pioneer data exists on a few hundred ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes, which can only be read on "antique" outdated computers. The agency is going to scrap, literally demolish, the only computers able to access and process that data in the next few months!

[edstrick]

When the gravimeter was proposed, selected and designed, the PI (Weber, I think) was claiming or about to claim possible detections of grativational waves with ultrasensative suspended cylinders. The consensus then and now was that plausible sources of waves in the frequency range that the sensors could detect were many orders of magnitude too small to detect (at least at distances out where there was any chance of an event occurring). But theory in 1970 was much less precise than now, too. By observing natural tidal oscillations of the moon and very low frequency seismic signals, they hoped to have a valuable experimet regardless of whether the "blue sky" gravity wave search was a bust or not.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

When the gravimeter was proposed, selected and designed, the PI (Weber, I think) was claiming or about to claim possible detections of grativational waves with ultrasensative suspended cylinders.  The consensus then and now was that plausible sources of waves in the frequency range that the sensors could detect were many orders of magnitude too small to detect (at least at distances out where there was any chance of an event occurring).  But theory in 1970 was much less precise than now, too.  By observing natural tidal oscillations of the moon and very low frequency seismic signals, they hoped to have a valuable experimet regardless of whether the "blue sky" gravity wave search was a bust or not.

Yes I remember that there was hopes to find gravitationnal waves with large aluminium cylinders which may resonate and amplify the wave signal. The first experiments to find gravitationnal waves started with such detectors, but they never produced anything. But the search was open...