Research team appears to solve the Pioneer anomaly
(Phys.org) -- Back in the early 70s NASA launched two exploratory spacecraft, Pioneer 10 and 11. Their missions were to gather information about the solar system as they made their way through it by flying farther and farther from the sun, until they eventually left altogether. Though neither craft has been heard from since 2003, both have confounded scientists since it was discovered in the 80s that they were not accelerating at the rate that physicists had predicted, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Pioneer anomaly. Now it appears a small team of dedicated researchers has figured out what is going on, and as they explain in their paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, its due to nothing more than the way the propulsion system onboard does its job.