The Pioneer Anomaly and its Implications

¹ Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
² Theoretical Division (MS-B285), Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA

Abstract

The Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deep space to date. However, their radio-metric tracking data has consistently indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. The drift is a blue-shift, uniformly changing with a rate of ~6 × 10^-9 Hz/s and can be interpreted as a constant sunward acceleration of each particular spacecraft of a_P = (8.74 ± 1.33) × 10^-10 m/s². The nature of this anomaly remains unexplained. Here we summarize our current knowledge of the discovered effect and review some of the mechanisms proposed for its explanation. Currently we are preparing for the analysis of the entire set of the available Pioneer 10/11 Doppler data which may shed a new light on the origin of the anomaly. We present a preliminary assessment of such an intriguing possibility.