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 The Pioneer data exists on a few hundred ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes, which can only be read on "antique" outdated computers.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!

[The Messenger]

Returning to the Pioneer Anomally:

You may or may not be aware of the curious brightening phenomenon being studied by Ann Verbiscer, per the Planetary Weblog:

"We see three different views of Saturn on different dates. The globe of Saturn hardly looks different at all at these small differences in phase angle. But look at the rings! With the minutest difference in phase angle -- from 0.13 degrees down to 0.02 degrees -- the rings suddenly flash into brilliant light. Anne told me that she saw similar effects on Saturn's icy satellites, especially Enceladus. The size of the opposition surge she saw was "drastically higher, 40% higher, than previously published values."

I'm not an astronomical observer myself so Anne had to explain to me what causes the opposition surge. One explanation is "shadow hiding" -- at any non-zero phase angle, the particles in the rings cast shadows across other particles in the rings, so that darkens the surface. But at zero phase, you see no shadows at all, and the surface looks brighter. But Anne said that "it doesn't work" to explain all of the observed opposition effect. You need something more, like coherent backscatter: that is, constructive interference of the light being reflected from the rings and Enceladus. 

There is an explanation that is consistent, actually a necessary constraint, upon the permeability hypothesis I entered above:

The rings of Saturn, the highly reflective surfaces of some of the moons, are more like mirrors than nominal planetary surfaces. The sunlight reflected by the rings, therefore, more closely resembles a mirrored reflection of the sun, and will return a loosely coherant image of the sun.

When the Earth passes exactly between the Sun and Saturn, the rings and more reflective moons brighten. Why would the reflection be brighter at the very center?

If and ony if there is curvature of space. The image of the sun is focused only at the center, at anyother position of the Earth relative to the sun and Saturn, the image is deconvoluted.

When the Earth is exactly positioned in front of the sun, a perfectly curved lens would return a much brighter reflection of the sun. That is exactly what is happening.

And why would there be curvature? If and only if the permeability of space varies, increasing the speed of light with increasing distance from the center of the solar system, and this would be true if and only if the permeability of space is a function of MASS.

OK, There may be other solutions: Fressnel lensing, for example, but the solution is a lensing solution because the amount of brightening is also a function of wavelength, as would be expected with any single density lensing element.

The curvature has to be very slight...almost undetectable, but not quite, because it produces this brilliant mirror effect exactly in the center - just as a gravitational lens should. But the Earth is too far from the sun to experience this kind of curvature, with GR, as formulated by Einstein, to be the cause. (Also the mass of the Earth is not great enough to cause a GR bending of the light.)

This also explains why there are so many 'Gravitational' lenses, and 'micro quasar' lenses in the galaxy: There is a not-so-new physical principle being manifest: The permeability of space is a function of mass, the speed of light is only a constant in an ideal vacuum that includes the absence of any matter.

Returning to the Pioneer Accelerations, they are an artifact: We use the two-way time and speed of light to determine the distance to the probes. As the speed of light increases at a rate of ~1X10^-9m/s^2, the time it takes light to reach the probes and return is less than if the speed of light were constant. We interpret this as an acceleration of the probes towards the sun, when it is actually a slight acceleration of light away from the sun. (Of course both the speed of light, and the acceleration of the probes are not independently constrained at this time, so the true acceleration of the probes is unknown.)

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Messenger, yes the Earth does have a "gravitationnal lens" effect, but it can significantly concentrates light only at a distance of several thousand light-years. This was put at work in the search of "machos" (massive objects such as blue dwarf stars, planets, brown dwarfs, black holes... explaining the dark matter around the galaxy). But the "machos" detected were very far, for instance in the Magellanic cloud, and the most common mass was around half what of the Sun, much larger than Earth. So I think the effect of gravitationnal lens is undetectable from Saturn. The opposition effect is well explained in terms of shadow hiding and back reflection from ice crystals, an effect we can also see on earth clouds (from above). The best evidence is that it was also photographied by Cassini (see somewhere on Cassini site or on this site) and from here it appears as a bright spot on the rings.