[NewCandle] More spacecraft velocity anomalies

[Horace Heffner]

On Mar 1, 2008, at 1:48 PM, Keith Nagel wrote:

> Here's a little more about the anomaly.
>
> http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080229-spacecraft-anomaly.html
>
> Physical Review Letters will publish the upcoming paper.
>
>> From the article:
>
> "The researchers looked at six deep-space probes - Galileo I and II to
> Jupiter, the NEAR mission to the asteroid Eros, the Rosetta probe to a
> comet, Cassini to Saturn, and the MESSENGER craft to Mercury. Each
> spacecraft flew past the our planet to either gain or lose orbital  
> energy in
> their quests to reach their eventual targets.
>
> In five of the six flybys, the scientists have confirmed anomalies.
>
> "I am feeling both humble and perplexed by this," said Anderson,  
> who is now
> working as a retiree. "There is something very strange going on with
> spacecraft motions. We have no convincing explanation for either  
> the Pioneer
> anomaly or the flyby anomaly."
>
> In the one probe the researchers did not confirm a noticeable  
> anomaly with,
> MESSENGER, the spacecraft approached the Earth at about latitude 31  
> degrees
> north and receded from the Earth at about latitude 32 degrees  
> south. "This
> near-perfect symmetry about the equator seemed to result in a very  
> small
> velocity change, in contrast to the five other flybys," Anderson  
> explained -
> so small no anomaly could be confirmed.
>
> The five other flybys involved flights whose incoming and outgoing
> trajectories were asymmetrical with each other in terms of their  
> orientation
> with Earth's equator.
>
> For instance, the NEAR mission approached Earth at about latitude  
> 20 south
> and receded from the planet at about latitude 72 south. The  
> spacecraft then
> seemed to fly 13 millimeters per second faster than expected.


Assuming a 24,000 mph flyby speed thats at least a couple orders of  
magnitude larger than I would expect from a peak gravimagnetic  
Lorentz force of about 2x10^-10 g.  This means, as I and I think  
others have have speculated, if the effect is indeed due to such a  
gravimagnetic force, that the alignment of particle spins due to the  
earth's magnetic field causes a substantial increase in the  
gravimagnetic field strength.  However, this provides a rough  
quantitative lower bound of the effect, and it is quite large for  
such a weak (1 gauss) field, several orders of magnitude.  A spinning  
superconductor in a 1T (10000 gauss) field thus should indeed provide  
a detectable gravimagnetic field, given a couple 1 ton masses  
separated by 0.1 m produce a fairly detectable 6.7x10^-3 N.

The effect might be enhanced by layering or sandwiching, and thus  
spinning, a high nuclear magnetic moment material, like cobalt, with  
the superconductor.  In fact, this all questions that a  
superconductor is necessary at all.  Just spinning up a cobalt disk  
in a high axial magnetic field might be sufficient.  Obviously nickel- 
iron works to a degree.



> While this is
> just one-millionth of that probe's total velocity, the precision of  
> the
> velocity measurements was 0.1 millimeters per second, carried out  
> as they
> were using radio waves bounced off the craft. This suggests the  
> anomaly seen
> is real - and one needing an explanation.
>
> The fact this effect seems most evident with flybys most  
> asymmetrical with
> respect to Earth's equator "suggests that the anomaly is related to  
> Earth's
> rotation," Anderson said."
>
>
>
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Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/