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Projects: Pioneer Anomaly

A Letter from the Executive Director

 

August 31, 2007

Dear Members and Supporters,

In 2005, we presented you with an extraordinary mystery and an historic opportunity. The mystery: why were two of NASA’s earliest interplanetary missions—Pioneer 10 and 11—traveling too slowly in their trajectories, apparently in complete violation of the laws of physics?

The opportunity then: to save the data from old media before the destruction planned by NASA, and to assemble the largest-ever set of Pioneer data.

Your response then was astonishing—literally unique in the Society’s 25-year history. From across America and around the world, our members spoke out, cheering us on, and providing the essential funds we needed to take on the challenge.

Thanks to that unprecedented outpouring of your support, under the direction of Dr. Slava Turyshev at JPL, we were able to save almost an entire record of 30 years of Pioneer data from two spacecraft.

Working closely with JPL and NASA, we enlisted the only engineers left in the world who had worked on the Pioneer missions directly and could still work with the antique Fortran 66 written data files we’d recovered. Plus, he integrated his own knowledge from handwritten notebooks recorded at the Deep Space Network. He and others on the team have brought us to the very edge of FINALLY solving the secret of the Pioneer Anomaly. Unfortunately, we’ve run into a new obstacle—one that could delay, or even kill, the investigation. We need your help today, to bulldoze this obstacle and learn what’s really going on with the Pioneer spacecraft.

I’m writing this emergency letter to bring you up to date on what we’ve accomplished, and to ask for your immediate help—in the form of a special gift, as large as you can possibly handle— to ensure that we can complete this project, solve this mystery, and perhaps change what every scientist on Earth thinks about basic physics.

As has been the case from the very beginning with the Pioneer Anomaly, the problem we’re facing today starts with the quality of data. In the last two years, we’ve saved an astonishing treasure trove of information: enough to build an almost uninterrupted file of radiometric Doppler data that provides information on the spacecraft velocity covering over 30 years of the lives of these two spacecraft. This is something completely unprecedented in the history of our space programs.

In assembling these data, the scientists encountered a bewildering array of computer languages, recording media, data storage protocols and even physical deterioration of unique data records. They soon discovered that before they could analyze much of anything, every computer file had to be “conditioned”: cleaned up and converted to a useable form. It’s entirely doable, but slow. (And can only be done by the handful of engineers left who still know the old file formats. Only they can recognize missing ancillary data, like DSN tracking station information that is sometimes missing and must be dug out of one-of-a-kind handwritten notebooks.)

But here’s where it gets frustrating:

NASA finally recognized the importance of this project, and budgeted funds to cover the analysis. But in a classic Catch-22, there is no money available for “conditioning” the data. For an old mission, the required dataconditioning step falls into a bureaucratic crack. Between that and the severe cutbacks in NASA’s science budget (which I’ve written to you about in recent months), there is no chance that they will be willing to add such monies, now or in the foreseeable future.

Without conditioning the data, nothing more can happen.

And if all that weren’t enough, now we’ve got a another “antique computer” problem. It turns out that much of the data-conditioning the team is doing requires obsolete DEC computers. The Jet Propulsion Lab still has one such machine, but just as with the old mainframe computers we needed at the very start of this project, so now with the DEC systems: JPL wants them out—soon—to make room for new projects. These computers hold all the legacy software, and systems installed and maintained for all these years specifically to do this kind of work. If those computers are scrapped, the project is basically over...whether the work is done or not.

So once again, the Planetary Society has been asked to intercede on an emergency basis. We need to find the resources to continue and complete the arduous process of cleaning up the data so it can be used for analysis— plus a temporary new home for the DEC computer. This is why your help today is so important.

You may recall that all of this started when a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist, John Anderson, noticed that the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft (first launched in 1972 and ‘73) appeared to be “breaking the rules.” They were falling behind in their trajectories by a small amount each year. Since then, a total of seven independent research groups—using the original data—have confirmed the initial findings of the Pioneer team.

But no one can yet explain why. One by one, obvious causes—like gravitational influences from Kuiper belt objects, or the effect of the solar wind—have been excluded. Now we’re down to only a handful of possible explanations.

But if these “conventional” explanations are all finally disproved, then we really will be left with groundbreaking new science: ideas like effects from so-called “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” and many other ideas. Or—in some ways the most radical idea of all—perhaps we’ve made a fundamental error in our understanding of Newtonian physics!

Help Solve the Mystery!

Are we going to help rewrite the science books or not?

The answer is just within reach right now. You can help us reach that answer.

However you cut it, this is a huge story in science. And the world has certainly noticed. The second Pioneer Explorer Collaboration Meeting was just held in Bern, Switzerland. Its gathering of more than 35 of the world’s leading scientists, all of them trying to resolve the puzzle of the Pioneer Anomaly. That kind of intellectual firepower doesn’t happen, except when the most significant scientific issues are on the line.

And yet despite the plain, indisputable importance of the Pioneer Anomaly—despite the worldwide interest it has generated among some of the finest minds in science—despite the fact that we literally have all the data within our grasp right now—bean-counters dictating NASA’s budget have trapped us in a bureaucratic process.

Well, maybe they’re willing to see all progress on the Pioneer Anomaly lost. We are not. You know that one of the Society’s greatest strengths is our flexibility. We’ve always run circles around government bureaucracies, even though (or maybe because) we rely on volunteer help and survive on paper-thin budgets. We’ve demonstrated this again and again over the years...and now we’re being asked to do it once more.

Dr. Slava Turyshev, and the others who’ve thrown themselves into solving the Pioneer Anomaly were making terrific progress. But their work is grinding to a halt from lack of funding. There’s only so much they can do, unless we can bring some new financial resources in.

Meanwhile, if JPL shoves its old DEC computers into the surplus bin, the project just might be over entirely.

Here’s what we need to do to turn this situation around. We need to:

  • come through with the resources ourselves to cover all the costs of cleaning up and “conditioning” the mountains of data we’ve found and saved.
  • simultaneously find a new, temporary home for the DEC computers.

Both of these obstacles can be overcome, so long as you stand beside us. Believe me, if you say “yes” by sending a generous, tax-deductible emergency contribution today, the Pioneer Anomaly team and several specialists helping them out, can and will be back to work in a heartbeat.

Will they discover some sort of paradigm-busting new fact about the way gravity works?

Will they force a change into every science textbook in the world? Or will they resolve the Pioneer Anomaly with an oh-so-subtle—but ultimately conventional—explanation?

Neither you nor I nor anyone else knows the answer—yet. But I know we can have that answer in hand very soon.

So what do you say? Do you want us to forge ahead? Please let us know as soon as possible. Help us continue this work by sending the largest gift you can afford. And remember, we’re under a deadline on this one. JPL will be putting those computers out of service soon, and we need to get moving on cleaning up the data so we can solve this mystery.

Thank you in advance for responding right away.

Sincerely,
Dr. Louis D. Friedman
Executive Director

P.S. Are we going to help rewrite the science books or not? The answer is just within reach right now. You can help us reach that answer, so please don’t delay a minute.