(jdff) wrote in message ...
[snip]
Also, there is the fact that the RANGE itself is not well-defined in
their measurement procedure (although the rate of change ought to be).
This is because of the PLL which is used to "reflect" the outgoing
transmission at the spacecraft. The assumption is that the spacecraft
transmitted frequency is instantaneously equal to N times the received
frequency. Of course, we don't have the engineering details, but the
spacecraft PLL is almost certainly second-order, and the phase noise
spec given in the paper mandates the PLL bandwidth to be sub-1 Hz. The
implication is that for the PLL to "converge", the output frequency
equals N times the input frequency as it was at least 1 second ago.
However, the PLL bandwidth - signal lag will remain constant over
time.

Similarly, the modulated ranging signal (as opposed to Doppler) has a
finite latency through the spacecraft, which does not seem to have
been modelled. These are small errors, but when the claimed accuracy
is ~10^-10 m/s^2........

Would the acceleration towards the earth (if measured) point to a
possible acceleration of time for pioneer 10.

If so how would it be possible to confirm ?

Spud

[Mod. note: quoted text trimmed. Please do this yourself -- mjh]