On March 2, 1972, a pleasant Thursday on Florida’s humid Cape Canaveral peninsula, a NASA Atlas-Centaur rocket lifted off with a 570-pound payload called Pioneer 10. Pioneer was a space probe designed to cross the belt. asteroid and perform a “fly-by” of Jupiter and the outer gas giants to study them. For the next ten years, Pioneer sent astonishing reports from the far reaches of the solar system, carrying out its mission with great success.
Then, instead of going silent as expected, Pioneer kept sending signals to Earth. Its tiny nuclear generator continued to generate the 70 watts of power needed to maintain a radio link with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and this continued for decades longer than anyone thought possible. Communication was maintained daily until January 23, 2003, more than thirty years after the mission began. By then, the probe was twice the distance from the sun as Neptune and Pluto, and Pioneer had become the first human-made object to forever abandon the grip of the sun’s gravity.
The Pioneer story would have been an important chapter in the history of science if it had ended there, but it didn’t. Experimental physics is full of examples of science projects designed to study one phenomenon but reveal unexpected truths about something else entirely, and the really interesting piece of Pioneer 10 history is one of them. Although he had carried out his robotic exploration of Jupiter and Saturn with skill and perseverance well beyond the call of duty (if one can apply that language to a robot), by the time he was passing the outer limits of the planetary system, it was clear to the NASA that was hundreds of thousands of miles from where the computer tracking programs said it should be. How was that possible?
The way objects move in space, whether they are Jupiter-sized planets or tiny spacecraft like Pioneer, is governed by well-known laws of physics that provide precise answers about location that can be measured in centimeters, even in the scale of the sun. system. That Pioneer was hundreds of thousands of miles from their course was simply not possible. No matter how it was approached, the problem just wouldn’t go away, and it soon became clear that something really strange was going on. NASA scientists gave this Pioneer quirk a name; they called it “The Anomaly.”
“The Pioneering Detectives: Did a Distant Spaceship Prove Einstein and Newton Wrong?” A recently published “Kindle Single” by Konstantin Kakaes, a talented journalist and writer who studied physics as a student at Harvard, explores the tantalizing clues that scientists uncovered while trying to explain the deviation from the Pioneer course. The more they dug, the less they seemed to understand. Immersed in the daily tracking records of the 30-year-old space probe, alarming and perhaps revolutionary questions began to emerge: Was the ship’s wandering course evidence of some new and unknown alteration in the fundamental laws of physics?
A slightly deviated spacecraft may seem like an unlikely subject for deep speculation about the fundamental nature of the universe, but the obvious solutions to Pioneer’s flight deviation were not disclosed. However, it was a matter of “black letter” physics, and errors of this type and of this magnitude simply cannot occur.
What could be the cause of “The anomaly”? NASA detectives did not seem to agree, although the list of possible culprits was long and terrifying: dark matter? Tensor-vector-scalar gravity? Collisions with gravitons? A fundamental error in Einstein’s equations?
The only thing clear about the questions posed by Pioneer and “The Anomaly” was that potentially groundbreaking discoveries were in the open for those brave and smart enough to tackle them successfully. This is a territory that young scientists call “new physics”, an uncharted land where new Nobel laureates are sometimes also found.
With clear and crisp prose, free from technical language, the science writer and former head of “The Economist” office in Mexico City, Konstantin Kakaes, provides us with a chilling scientific detective story, which traces the mental processes and the work of those who have committed to untangling this situation. -The enigma of science is put into play. Kakaes is based on extensive interviews and archival research, following the story from the initial discovery of “The Anomaly” through decades of relentless investigation, to its final conclusion. “The Pioneer Detectives” is a fascinating and definitive account, not only of the Pioneer Anomaly, but also of how scientific knowledge is created and unmade, and scientists sometimes risk their reputations and their livelihoods in search of cosmic truths.
This was a great read that kept me up very late at night. Highly recommended.
