- #1
SF
The flyby anomalies, you may remember, are a set of fascinating data indicating that spacecraft flying past Earth undergo a strange, step-like change in their acceleration.
The Galileo, Near, Cassini and Rosetta spacecraft all seem to have been hit by this weird phenomenon and while that’s not a large number of data points, it is an impressive proportion of the few spacecraft that have flown past Earth on their way to other parts of the solar system.
Nobody knows what causes this effect but there are a growing number of fascinating ideas. For example, I’ve blogged about a Casimir force-like change in inertia. And today, Stephen Adler at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton considers the possibility that these spacecraft are banging into lumps of dark matter as they swing past the planet.
In an impressive analysis, Adler doesn’t rule out an interaction with dark matter but he does impose some severe limits on how this process might occur. The problem is that we’ve witnessed both increases and decreases in the acceleration of these spacecraft so any dark matter model would have to allow for this.
http://arxivblog.com/?p=428
The Galileo, Near, Cassini and Rosetta spacecraft all seem to have been hit by this weird phenomenon and while that’s not a large number of data points, it is an impressive proportion of the few spacecraft that have flown past Earth on their way to other parts of the solar system.
Nobody knows what causes this effect but there are a growing number of fascinating ideas. For example, I’ve blogged about a Casimir force-like change in inertia. And today, Stephen Adler at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton considers the possibility that these spacecraft are banging into lumps of dark matter as they swing past the planet.
In an impressive analysis, Adler doesn’t rule out an interaction with dark matter but he does impose some severe limits on how this process might occur. The problem is that we’ve witnessed both increases and decreases in the acceleration of these spacecraft so any dark matter model would have to allow for this.
http://arxivblog.com/?p=428