Analysis of an extended Pioneer 10 and 11 data set

摘要

A previous JPL study of Doppler tracking data from Pioneer 10 and 11 detected an anomalous and apparently constant acceleration, ap, acting against the spacecraft's general direction of motion (ap~8·10?10 ms?2) [1]. The existence of this anomaly has been independently confirmed, but as yet there is no satisfactory explanation of the observed Pioneer 10 and 11 trajectories, that is, the systematic origin of the phenomena is still unknown.A new effort to study the origin of ap is underway by an international collaboration led by JPL since extended Pioneer 10 and 11 data sets are now available. These contain housekeeping telemetry data for the missions' entirety as well as additional Doppler tracking data that cover the missions' early phases (4.6 to 80.2 AU for Pioneer 10 and 1.0 to 41.7 AU for Pioneer 11). Housekeeping telemetry data can be used to investigate maneuvers and fly–by events in detail, as well as provide verification of a FE(finite element) thermal model of the spacecraft.Here in this paper aspects of the data analysis as being performed at ZARM are discussed.