Pioneer : Anomaly Still Anonymous

On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:48:20 +0100, "George Dishman"
wrote:


"Lester Zick" wrote in message
.. .
On 19 Jul 2006 23:05:49 -0700, "George Dishman"
wrote:


Lester Zick wrote:
On Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:51:32 +0100, "George Dishman"
wrote:


"Lester Zick" wrote in message
.. .
On 19 Jul 2006 02:04:43 -0700, "George Dishman"
wrote:


Lester Zick wrote:
...
Certain latency mods to Newtonian gravitation can in fact
adequately
explain ... the Pioneer anomaly ...

I don't believe you, please show your calculations.

Are you a publication of record, George?

Nope, just someone who considers you to be making a
claim you cannot back up by showing your derivation
of a_P based on the addition of "certain latency
mods to Newtonian gravitation". Of course if you have
already published them in a publication of record, I
will apologise.

So if I'm correct but haven't published you won't apologize? Not sure
that offers much incentive.

Not at all, I thought you were implying you had. If
you can show the modified Newtonian equation and
then show your calculations that match Pioneer,
then I still owe you that apology. I'm a reasonable
chap as many in the group will tell you.

Let me tell you a brief story. In 89 as an offer of good faith to the
editor of a revisionist magazine to show I had some interesting ideas
in astrophysics, I explained that globular clusters surrounding the
Milky Way were the youngest not the oldest objects in the galaxy as
was commonly thought at the time. Needless to say five years or so
later the astrophysical community was astounded to learn they had been
completely mistaken. Once burned twice shy.

Globular clusters are still known to be very old

Decades old conventional wisdom based on a supposition that globular
clusters had blown away all their interstellar dust.

No, based on mass distributions I believe. Only
small stars left since the large ones have long
since burnt out.

No sense arguing about it.

I don't know what
the new evidence for their actual youth consisted of but I distinctly
remember reading about it.

I can find nothing to support that, but I'm not
a professional.

Oh well.

My inference was based on the idea that
stars in the globular cluster had not yet collapsed into a rotating
disk analogous to the Milky Way and had not had time to produce a
significant amount of interstellar dust. Just annoying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_cl...bular_clusters

Are you perhaps thinking of open clusters?

Don't think so. It was only a casual aside to the editor of that
magazine in any event. But the subject was definitely the halo of
globular clusters surrounding the Milky Way.

I think you just picked up some article incorrectly.
Anyway, that's not the topic.

I agree but I'm a lot more careful than that about things I've
actually discussed. Perhaps it was only an isolated revisionist
interpretation but there it was wherever it may have been.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_cluster

My calculation in the case of Pioneer 11 works out within 2% according
to the rough figures available in the column 1 article in the L.A.
Times of 12/21/04 as I recall. I emailed the subject of the article
c/o JPL and the Times to the discoverer but predictably got no reply.

Depending on what figures you need, you can get the
basic trajectory values from the JPL Horizons system.

Oh well 2% is close enough for government work I expect.

Horizons is an easy interface for a cursory look. If
you really want to have a go, the limited data set
used for the initial studies is freely available but
processing it isn't trivial:

http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/users/craigm/atdf/

There's a lot of helpful information on Craig's page
and the raw data files are available at the bottom,
about 400Mb altogether. The extended data recently
recovered probably won't be available for some time.

It's the
mechanical principle involved that's interesting. It turns out to be a
trivial calculation in the case of Pioneer 11. Considerably less so in
the case of Mercury's anomalous perihelion advance. I didn't even
bother with it until a couple months ago.

So let's see your calculation.

Sorry. You're welcome to think of me what you want but I really prefer
to be talking for the record only if priority is established. I don't
know if posting on the usenet qualifies.I've heard different opinions.

~v~~