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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 of hundreds of millions of dollars.But there might be a cheaper way to find an explanation. Gary Page of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and his colleagues have identified 15 asteroids that might also be subjected to the mysterious force. The asteroids' orbits all stretch far into the outer solar system. This is crucial because the Pioneer anomaly only shows up beyond about twice the distance from the sun to Saturn.
Topic: Lost asteroid and the displaced Pioneer probe. (Read 804 times)