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Showing posts with label gravity anomaly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gravity anomaly. Show all posts

Thursday, 12 January 2012

Dinosaurs and the Gravity Problem

Dinosaurs and the Gravity Problem


by Ted Holden




Scientists delight in devising explanations for the great dinosaur extinctions.

But there are several questions which they have failed to even ask, much less tried to answer.

·      Why, for instance, in all of the time claimed to have passed since the dinosaur extinctions, has nothing ever re-evolved to the sizes of the large dinosaurs?
·      If such sizes worked for creatures which ruled the Earth for tens of millions of years, then why would not some species of elephant or rhinoceros have evolved to such a size again?
·      What kinds of problems, if any, would sauropod sizes entail in our world as it is presently constituted?
·      Could it be that some aspect of our environment might have to be massively different for such creatures to exist at all?
A careful study of the sizes of these antediluvian creatures, and what it would take to deal with such sizes in our world, has led me to believe that the super animals of Earth's past could not live in our present world at all.

A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status. Fossils found in the 1970's now dwarf this creature.

Both the brachiosaur and the supersaur were larger than the brontosaur, and the ultrasaur appears to have dwarfed them all.1 The ultrasaur is now estimated to have weighed 180 tons.2

A comparison of dinosaur lifting requirements to human lifting capabilities is enlightening, though there might be objections to doing so. One objection that might be raised is that animal muscle tissue was somehow "better" than that of humans. This, however, is known not to be the case.

According to Knut Schmidt-Nielson, author of Scaling: Why is Animal Size So Important?, the maximum stress or force that can be exerted by any muscle is independent of body-size and is the same for mouse or elephant muscle.3

Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic creatures. But nobody believes that anymore; they had no adaptation for aquatic life, their teeth show wear and tear which does not come from eating soft aquatic vegetation, and trackways show them walking on land with no difficulty.

A final objection might be that dinosaurs were somehow more "efficient" than top human athletes. This, however, goes against all observed data. As creatures get bulkier, they become less efficient; the layers of thick muscle in limbs begin to get in each other's way and bind to some extent. For this reason, scaled lifts for the super-heavyweight athletes are somewhat lower than for, say, the 200-pound athletes.

By "scaled lift" I mean a lift record divided by the two-thirds power of the athlete's body weight.

As creatures get larger, weight, which is proportional to volume, goes up in proportion to the cube of the increase in dimension. Strength, on the other hand, is known to be roughly proportional to the cross-section of muscle for any particular limb and goes up in proportion to the square of the increase in dimension. This is the familiar "square-cube" problem.4

Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power lifters in the 1970s and 1980s.

Power lifters are, in my estimation, the strongest of all athletes; they concentrate on the three most difficult total-body lifts, i.e. bench press, squat, and dead-lift. They work out many hours a day and, it is fairly common knowledge, use food to flavor their anabolic steroids. No animal the same weight as one of these men could be presumed to be as strong.

Kazmaier was able to do squats and dead lifts with weights between 1,000 and 1,100 pounds on a bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.
 
 http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropods/bookimage.jpg

Standing Up at 70,000 pounds


Any animal has to be able to lift its own weight off the ground, i.e. stand up, with no more difficulty than Kazmaier experiences doing a 1,000-pound squat.

Consider, however, what would happen to Mr. Kazmaier, were he to be scaled up to 70,000 pounds, the weight commonly given for the brontosaur. Kazmaier's maximum effort at standing, fully warmed up, assuming the 1,000 pound squat, was 1,340 pounds (1,000 pounds for the bar and 340 pounds for himself). The scaled maximum lift would be 47,558 pounds (the solution to: 1,340/340.667 = x/70,000.667).

Clearly, he would not be able to lift his weight off the ground!

A sauropod dinosaur had four legs you might say; so what happens if Mr. Kazmaier uses arms and legs at 70,000 pounds? The truth is that the squat uses almost every muscle in the athlete's body very nearly to the limits, but in this case, it does not even matter.

A near maximum bench press effort for Mr. Kazmaier would fall around 600 pounds. This merely changes the 1,340 pounds to 1,940 pounds in the equation above, and the answer comes out as 68,853 pounds. Even using all muscles, some more than once, the strongest man who we know anything about would not be able to lift his own weight off the ground at 70,000 pounds.

To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 pounds, one has to believe that a creature whose weight was mostly gut and the vast digestive mechanism involved in processing huge amounts of low-value foodstuffs was, somehow, stronger than an almost entirely muscular creature its size, far better trained and conditioned than any grazing animal.

That is not only ludicrous in the case of the brontosaur, but the calculations only become more absurd when you try to scale up to the supersaur and ultrasaur at their sizes.

How heavy can an animal get to be in our world, then? How heavy would Mr. Kazmaier be at the point at which the square-cube problem made it as difficult for him to stand up as it is for him to do 1,000-pound squats at his present weight of 340 pounds?

The answer is 20,803 pounds (the solution to: 1,340/340.667 = x/x.667). In reality, elephants do not appear to get quite to that point.

Christopher McGowan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, claims that a Toronto Zoo specimen was the largest in North America at 14,300 pounds,5 and Smithsonian personnel once informed me that the gigantic bush elephant specimen which appears at their Museum of Natural History weighed around 8 tons.
 
http://dinosaurtheory.com/brachiosaurus.gif


Sauropod Dinosaurs' Necks


A study of the sauropod dinosaurs' long neck
further underscores the problem these creatures would have living under current gravitational conditions. Scientists who study sauropod dinosaurs now claim that they held their heads low, because they could not have gotten blood to their brains had they held them high.6

McGowan mentions the fact that a giraffe's blood pressure - which at 200-to-300 mm Hg (millimeters of mercury) is far higher than that of any other animal-would probably rupture the vascular system of any other animal. The giraffe's blood pressure is maintained by thick arterial walls and by a very tight skin that apparently acts like a jet pilot's pressure suit. A giraffe's head might reach to 20 feet.

How a sauropod might have gotten blood to its brain at 50 or 60 feet is the real question.

"Gravity is a pervasive force in the environment and has dramatically shaped the evolution of plants and animals," notes Harvey Lillywhite, a zoologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville.
As some land animals evolved large body sizes,

"cardiovascular specializations were needed to help them withstand the weight of blood in long vertical vessels. Perhaps nowhere in the history of life were these challenges greater than among the gigantic, long-necked sauropods"

For a Barosaurus to hold its head high, Lillywhite has calculated that its heart,

"must have generated pressures at least six times greater than those of humans and three to four times greater than those of giraffes." 7
Faced with the same dilemma, University of Pennsylvania geologist Peter Dodson remarked that while the Brachiosaurus was built like a giraffe and may have fed like one, most sauropods were built quite differently.

"At the base of the neck," Dodson writes, "a sauropod's vertebral spines, unlike those of a giraffe, were weak and low and did not provide leverage for the muscles required to elevate the head in a high position.

Furthermore, the blood pressure required to pump blood up to the brain, thirty or more feet in the air, would have placed extraordinary demands on the heart and would seemingly have placed the animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurysm, or some other circulatory disaster." 8
Within recorded history, Central Asians have tried to breed hunting eagles for size and strength, and have not gotten beyond 25 pounds or thereabouts. Even at that weight they are able to take off only with the greatest difficulty.

Something was vastly different in the pre-flood world.

The only way to keep the required blood pressure "reasonable," Dodson goes on to add,

is "if sauropods fed with the neck extended just a little above heart level, say from ground level up to fifteen feet..."
One problem with this solution is that the good leaves were, in all likelihood, above the 20-foot mark; an ultrasaur that could not raise its head above 20 feet would probably starve.

Dodson, it should also be noted, entirely neglects the dilemma of the brachiosaur. And there is another problem, which is worse. Try holding your arm out horizontally for even a few minutes, and then imagine your arm being 40 feet long.

Given a scale model and a weight figure for the entire dinosaur, it is possible to use volume-based techniques to estimate weight for a sauropod's neck. An ultrasaur is generally thought to be a near cousin - if not simply a very large specimen - of the brachiosaur.

The technique, then, is to measure the volume of water which the sauropod's neck (severed at the shoulders and filled with bondo or auto-body putty) displaces, versus the volume which the entire brachiosaur displaces, and simply extrapolate to the 360,000-pound figure for the ultrasaur. I did this using a Larami Corporation model of a brachiosaur, which is to scale.

To make a long story short, the neck weighs 28,656 pounds, and the center of gravity of that neck is 15 feet from the shoulders, the neck itself being 38 feet long.

This equates to 429,850 foot-pounds of torque.

If we assume the sauropod could lift its head at least as easily as a human with an 18-inch neck can move his head against a neck-exercise machine set to 130 pounds, then the sauropod would require the muscular strength of a neck 17.4 feet in diameter.

With a more reasonable assumption of effort, equivalent to the human using a 50-pound setting, the sauropod would require a neck of over 20 feet in diameter. But the sauropod's neck, at its widest, apparently measured about ten feet by seven feet where it joined the shoulders, then narrowed rapidly to about six or seven feet in diameter over the remainder of its length.

McGowan and others claim that the head and neck were supported by a dorsal ligament and not muscles, but we know of no living creature using ligaments to support a body structure which its available musculature cannot sustain.

In all likelihood, sauropods, in our gravity at least, could neither hold their heads up nor out.
 
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Antediluvian Flying Creatures


The large flying creatures of the past would also have had difficulties in our present-day gravity.

In the antediluvian world, 350-pound flying creatures soared in skies which no longer permit flying creatures above 30 pounds or so. Modern birds of prey, like the Argentinian teratorn, weighing 170 to 200 pounds, with 30-foot wingspans, also flew. Within recorded history, Central Asians have been trying to breed hunting eagles for size and strength, and have not gotten them beyond 25 pounds or thereabouts. Even at that weight they are able to take off only with the greatest difficulty.

Something was vastly different in the pre-flood world.

Nothing much larger than 30 pounds or so flies anymore, and those creatures, albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and eagles, are marginal. Albatrosses, notably, are called "goonie birds" by sailors because of the extreme difficulty they experience taking off and landing, their landings being badly controlled crashes, and this despite long wings made for maximum lift.

In remote times, the felt effect of the force of gravity on Earth must have been much less for such giant creatures to be able to fly. No flying creature has since re-evolved into anything of such size, and the one or two birds that have retained this size have forfeited flight, their wings becoming vestigial.

Adrian Desmond, in his book The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs, has a good deal to say about some of the problems the Pteranodon faced at just 40-to-50 pounds. Scientists once thought this pterosaur was the largest creature that ever flew.

The bird's great size and negligible weight must have made for a rather fragile creature.
"It is easy to imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the gigantic wings would have made landing dangerous," writes Desmond.

"How could the creature have alighted without shattering all of its bones? How could it have taken off in the first place? It was obviously unable to flap 12-foot wings strung between straw-thin tubes. Many larger birds have to achieve a certain speed by running and flapping before they can take off and others have to produce a wing beat speed approaching hovering in order to rise.

To achieve hovering with a 23-foot wingspread, Pteranodon would have required 220 pounds of flight muscles as efficient as those in humming birds. But it had reduced its musculature to about 8 pounds, so it is inconceivable that Pteranodon could have taken off actively." 9
Since the Pteranodon could not flap its wings, the only flying it could ever do, Desmond concludes, was as a glider.

It was, he says,
"the most advanced glider the animal kingdom has produced."10
Desmond notes a fairly reasonably modus operandi for the Pteranodon.

Not only did the bird have a throat pouch like a pelican but its remains were found with fish fossils, which seems to suggest a pelican-like existence, soaring over the waves and snapping up fish without landing.

If so, then the Pteranodon should have been practically immune from the great extinctions of past ages. Large animals would have the greatest difficulty getting to high ground and other safe havens at times of floods and other global catastrophes. But high places safe from flooding were always there, oceans were always there, and fish were always there.

The Pteranodon's way of life should have been impervious to all mishap.

There is one other problem. The Pteranodon was not the largest bird.

The giant Teratorn finds of Argentina were not known when Desmond's book was written. News of this bird's existence first appeared in the 1980s. The Terotorn was a 160-to-200 pound eagle with a 27-foot wingspan, a modern bird whose existence involved, among other things, flapping wings and aerial maneuvers.

But how so? How could it even have flown?

How large can an animal be and still fly?
"With each increase in size, and therefore also weight," writes Desmond, "a flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.

The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 pounds..."
It is for this reason that scientists believed Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were the largest flying animals of all time.

The experience from our present world coincides well with this and, in fact, don't go quite that high. The biggest flying creatures which we actually see are albatrosses, geese, and the like, at 30 to 35 pounds.

The Pteranodon's reign as the largest flying creature of all time actually fell in the early 1970s when Douglas Lawson of the University of California found partial skeletons of three ultra-large pterosaurs in Big Bend National Park in Texas. This discovery forced scientists to rethink their ideas on the maximum size permissible in flying vertebrates.

The immense size of the Big Bend pterosaurs may be gauged by noting that the humerus or upper arm bones of these creatures is fully twice the length of Pteranodon's. Lawson estimated the wingspan for this living glider at over fifty feet.

The Big Bend pterosaurs were not fishers. Their remains were found in rocks that were formed some 250 miles inland and nowhere near any lake deposits. This led Lawson to suggest that these birds were carrion feeders, gorging themselves on rotting mounds of dismembered dinosaur flesh.

But this hypothesis raised numerous questions in author Desmond's mind.
"How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves is something of a puzzle," he wonders.

"Wings of such an extraordinary size could not have been flapped when the animal was grounded. Since the pterosaurs were unable to run in order to launch themselves they must have taken off vertically.

Pigeons are only able to take-off vertically by reclining their bodies and clapping the wings in front of them; as flappers, the Texas pterosaurs would have needed very tall stilt-like legs to raise the body enough to allow the 24-foot wings to clear the ground.

The main objection, however, still rests in the lack of adequate musculature for such an operation."12
The only solution seems to be that they lifted passively off the ground by the wind. But this situation, notes Desmond, would leave these ungainly Brobdignagian pterosaurs vulnerable to attack when grounded.

While Desmond mentions a number of ancillary problems here, any of which would throw doubt on the pterosaur's ability to exist as mentioned, he neglects the biggest question of all: the calculations that say 50 pounds are the maximum weight have not been shown to be in error; we have simply discovered larger creatures. Much larger.

This is what is called a dilemma.

Those who had estimated a large wingspan for the Big Bend bird were immediately attacked by aeronautical engineers.
"Such dimensions broke all the rules of flight engineering," wrote Colorado paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, in The Dinosaur Heresies, "a creature that large would have broken its arm bones if it tried to fly..."13
Subsequently, the proponents of a large wingspan were forced to back off somewhat, since the complete wing bones had not been discovered.

But Bakker believes these pterosaurs really did have wingspans of over 60 feet and that they simply flew despite our not comprehending how. The problem is ours, he says, and he proposes no solution.

So much for the idea of anything re-evolving into the sizes of the flying creatures of the antediluvian world. What about the possibility of man breeding something like a Teratorn? Could man actively breed even a 50-pound eagle?

Berkuts are the biggest of eagles.

And Atlanta, an eagle that Sam Barnes, one of England's top falconers in the 1970s, brought back to Wales from Kirghiz, Russia, is, at 26 pounds in flying trim, as large as they ever get.14 These eagles have been bred specifically for size and ferocity for many centuries. They are the most prized of all possessions amongst nomads, and are the imperial hunting bird of the Turko-Mongol peoples.

The only reason Barnes was allowed to bring her back is that Atlanta had a disease for which no cure was available in Kirghiz and was near to death. A Berkut of Atlanta's size, Barnes was told, would normally be worth more than a dozen of the most beautiful women in Kirghiz.


Elephants are simply too heavy to run in our world. The best they can manage is a kind of a fast walk. Mammoths were as big and bigger than the largest elephants, however, and Pleistocene art clearly shows them galloping.
 

The killing powers of a big eagle are out of proportion to its size. Berkuts are normally flown at wolves, deer, and other large prey. Barnes witnessed Atlanta killing a deer in Kirghiz, and was told that she had killed a black wolf a season earlier. Mongols and other nomads raise sheep and goats, and obviously have no love for wolves.

A wolf might be little more than a day at the office for Atlanta with her 11-inch talons, however, a wolf is a big deal for an average-sized Berkut at 15-to-20 pounds. Obviously, there would be an advantage to having the birds be bigger, i.e. to having the average Berkut weigh 25 pounds, and for a large one to weigh 40-to-50 pounds. It has never been done, however, despite all the efforts and funds poured into the enterprise since the days of Genghis Khan.

The breeding of Berkuts has continued apace from that day to this, but the Berkuts have still not gotten any bigger than 25 pounds or so.15

It is worth recalling here the difficulty which increasingly larger birds experience in getting airborne from flat ground. Atlanta was powerful enough in flight, but she was not easily able to take off from flat ground. This could spell disaster in the wild. A bird of prey will often land with prey, and if take-off from flat ground to avoid trouble is not possible, the bird's life becomes imperiled.

A bird bigger than Atlanta with her 10-foot wingspan, like a Teratorn with a 27-foot wingspan and weighing 170 pounds, would simply not Survive.
 


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Assorted Other Evidence


There are other categories of evidence, derived from a careful analysis of antediluvian predators, to show that gravitational conditions in the distant past were not the same as they are today.

It is well known, for example, that elephant-sized animals cannot sustain falls, and that elephants spend their entire lives avoiding them.

For an elephant, the slightest tumble can break bones and/or destroy enough tissue to prove fatal. Predators, however, live by tackling and tumbling with prey. One might think that this consideration would preclude the existence of any predator too large to sustain falls. Weight estimates for the tyrannosaurs, however, include specimens heavier than any elephant.

That appears to be a contradiction.

Moreover, elephants are simply too heavy to run in our world. As is well known, they manage a kind of a fast walk. They cannot jump, and anything resembling a gully stops them cold. Mammoths were as big and bigger than the largest elephants, however, and Pleistocene art clearly shows them galloping.

Finally, there is the Utahraptor. Recently found in Utah, this creature is a 20-foot, 1,500-pound version of a Velociraptor.16

The creature apparently ran on the balls of its two hind feet, on two toes in fact, the third toe carrying a 12-inch claw for disemboweling prey. This suggests a very active lifestyle. Very few predators appear to be built for attacking prey notably larger than themselves; the Utahraptor appears to be such a case.

In our world, of course, 1,500-pound toe dancers do not exist. The only example we have of a 1,500-pound land predator is the Kodiak bear, the lumbering gait and mannerisms of which are familiar to us all.

And so, over and over again, this same kind of dilemma-things which cannot happen in our world having been the norm in the antediluvian world.



From Reality Sandwich @ http://www.realitysandwich.com/mushroom_gnosis where there is more!


New Illuminati comments: The authors posit one explanation at the above site. However, Expanding Earth theory seems to provide a more pertinent device for lower gravity in earlier epochs.


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Thursday, 24 June 2010

NASA's great gravity mystery

NASA's great gravity mystery

An unexplained force [or field] appears to be acting against identical Pioneer probes - and at least four others

Pioneer  10
NASA
An artist's interpretation of NASA's Pioneer 10 probe looking back at the sun as it leaves the solar system.

It’s been years since NASA last heard from either of its two Pioneer probes hurtling out of the solar system, but scientists are still debating the source of an odd force pushing against the outbound spacecraft.
Dubbed the Pioneer Anomaly, the unexplained force appears to be acting against NASA’s identical Pioneer 10 and 11 probes, holding them back as they head away from the sun.
Whether that force stems from the probes themselves, something exotic like dark matter, or some new facet of physics or gravity, remains in doubt.
But a wealth of newly recovered data and telemetry, spanning decades of observations by both Pioneer 10 and 11, may yield the final answer to whether conventional physics or perhaps something new is at work on the two spacecraft…
“I would like to see this story reach its finality,” said Slava Turyshev, an astrophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who has spent the last 14 years—some of it on his own time—studying the Pioneer Anomaly. "So if it’s conventional physics, that’s fine and we can all go about our daily business. But if it’s something else, there may be another page.”
He and other fellow devotees discussed the astrophysics oddity… during the Seventh Annual Asimov Debate at the American Museum of Natural History.
Turyshev’s international team includes researchers from all Pioneer Anomaly camps, with some learning towards a conventional physics explanation while others trend toward the unknown fringe. Still other researchers have their own opinions.
“If I were a betting man, which I am not, I would bet a whole case of cranberry juice that the Pioneer Anomaly will have an ordinary explanation that is within known physics,” said Irwin Shapiro, an astrophysicist at Harvard University unaffiliated with the Pioneer Anomaly research team, during the debate.
Shapiro said that the number of actual instances in which oddities like the Pioneer Anomaly have opened pathways to fundamentally new physics are rare, and that ongoing studies may yet yield a conventional explanation.

Perplexing push

Launched in 1972 and 1973, Pioneer 10 and 11 are both billions of miles from Earth as they zoom out of the solar system in opposite directions.
As of Feb. 6, Pioneer 10 was about 92.12 astronomical units (AU) from the sun and headed towards the constellation Taurus. One AU is the distance between the Earth and sun, or about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).
Researchers first noticed the Pioneer Anomaly as a navigation discrepancy while bouncing microwaves off each Pioneer probe as they moved farther from Earth. They found an unexpected drift in each probe’s Doppler frequency, one so small that the three-axis stabilized probes like NASA’s Voyager spacecraft—also headed out of the solar system—may have drowned it out with their in-flight activities.
The Doppler effect is the shortening or lengthening of waves, such as the pitch change of an ambulance as it approaches, races past, then heads away from you “We had a fitting model and it had all the effects in it that would influence the spacecraft out in interstellar space, except that it didn’t work,” said John Anderson, a retired JPL researcher who first discovered the Pioneer Anomaly. “And all we had to do to make it work was to add a constant acceleration towards the sun.”
The discrepancy found that Pioneer 10 and 11 were each about 240,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) closer to the sun than they should be according to the current understanding of gravity. Isaac Newton described gravity as a force that weakens with distance, and the Pioneer probes are speeding out of the solar system at about 30,000 miles (48,280 kilometers) per hour...

 

Five spacecraft experience unexpected anomalies in their motions
click  to zoom
U.S. researchers are now collaborating with German colleagues to search for possible anomalies in the Rosetta probe’s second flyby of the Earth on November 13.

Mysteriously, four spacecraft that flew past Earth have each displayed unexpected anomalies in their motions.
These newfound enigmas join the so-called "Pioneer anomaly" as hints that unexplained forces may appear to act on spacecraft.
A decade ago, after rigorous analyses, anomalies were seen with the identical Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft as they hurtled out of the solar system. Both seemed to experience a tiny but unexplained constant acceleration toward the sun.
A host of explanations have been bandied about for the Pioneer anomaly. At times these are rooted in conventional science — perhaps leaks from the spacecraft have affected their trajectories. At times these are rooted in more speculative physics — maybe the law of gravity itself needs to be modified.
Now Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer John Anderson and his colleagues — who originally helped uncover the Pioneer anomaly — have discovered that five spacecraft each raced either a tiny bit faster or slower than expected when they flew past Earth en route to other parts of the solar system.
‘Humble and perplexed’

The researchers looked at five deep-space probes — Galileo 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 our planet to either gain or lose orbital energy in their quests to reach their eventual targets. (Galileo made two flybys.)
The scientists confirmed anomalies in five of the six flybys, involving four of the five spacecraft.
"I am feeling both humble and perplexed by this," said Anderson, who is now working on the anomaly 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 case where researchers did not confirm a noticeable anomaly, Messenger's flyby, the spacecraft approached Earth at about latitude 31 degrees north and receded from 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. The change in velocity was 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 (a half-inch) per second faster than expected. 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 in need of 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.
As to whether these new anomalies are linked with the Pioneer anomaly, "I would be very surprised if we have discovered two independent spacecraft anomalies," Anderson told Space.com. "I suspect they are connected, but I really do not know."
Unbound idea

These anomalies might be effects we see with an object possessing a spacecraft's mass, between 660 and 2,200 pounds (300 to 1,000 kilograms), Anderson speculated.
"Another thing in common between the Pioneer and these flybys is what you would call an unbound orbit around a central body," Anderson said. "For instance, the Pioneers are flying out of the solar system — they're not bound to their central body, the Sun. For the other flybys, the Earth is the central body. These kinds of orbits just don't occur very often in nature — it could be when you get into an unbound orbit around a central body, something goes on that's not in our standard models."
The researchers are now collaborating with German colleagues to search for possible anomalies in the Rosetta probe's second flyby of Earth on Nov. 13.
"We should continue to monitor spacecraft during Earth flybys. We should look carefully at newly recovered Pioneer data for more evidence of the Pioneer anomaly," Anderson added. "We should think about launching a dedicated mission on an escape trajectory from the solar system, just to look for anomalies in its motion."
Montana State University physicist Ronald Hellings, who did not participate in this study, said, "There's definitely something going on. Whether that's because of new physics or some problem with the model we have is yet to be worked out, as far as I know. A lot of people are trying to look into this."
Anderson and his colleagues will detail their latest findings in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.
© 2008 Space.com. All rights reserved. 

 
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From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com