FAR-FLUNG asteroids could help reveal the nature of the mysterious force that has nudged NASA’s 33-year-old Pioneer 10 spacecraft about 400,000 kilometres off course.
The so-called Pioneer anomaly could be accounted for by a force pulling the probe towards the sun with a strength of just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth’s surface. But no one has managed to explain the nature of this force, and many suspect that it is just a systematic error in the data or a fault of the spacecraft design. Others have suggested sending another spacecraft to study the effect, at a cost…
