"G. R. L. Cowan" wrote in message ...
Andr? Michaud wrote:

(Spud) wrote in message ...
Is there enough information to state the acceleration is directly
towards the sun ?

Yes.

What if there is an acceleration towards the earth ?

Isn't this worth investigating.

There is no need. Both crafts are on escape trajectories from
the Solar system in opposite directions, the Sun being the
central body of the system.

The attraction of the Earth is totally negligible at the
distances involved.

And yet it was the target of the probes' transmissions,
and to aim their antennae, they aimed their whole bodies at it.

Since the anomalous acceleration was so small,
and the angle between Earth and the sun
as seen from the probes was also small in most of the
years when the acceleration was being measured,
it may well be that there is no way to tell
whether they were anomalously accelerating towards the Sun
due to some Solar-mass-dependent effect,
or towards the Earth because of a force
aligned with one of their axes.

If you knew, and could show, that for sure
no such force could have been acting,
then of course no investigation would be worthwhile.
Maybe it still isn't, but the case for not looking
is not made by assuming nothing can be there.

I see what you mean, and I agree in principle. We cannot
assume stuff without analysis.

I don't think that anyone can "prove" that no force
could have been acting between the Earth and the
probes.

I just understand that the only known long range force
(and only possible candidate force, from all we know)
that could have been acting between the Earth and the
probes, and which is gravitation, is negligible at such
distances compared to that acting from the Sun.

As for the Doppler analysis, it seems impossible to me
that compensation for the cyclic orbital motion of the Earth
would not have been the very first correction to have been
applied to the data.

From all the papers published, it seems to me that just
about all possible avenues not jeopardyzing GR and SR have
by now been explored and rejected as unsatisfactory or
shelved as non conclusive or impossible to verify.

André Michaud