The Puzzle of the Flyby Anomaly

Abstract

Close planetary flybys are frequently employed as a technique to place spacecraft on extreme solar system trajectories that would otherwise require much larger booster vehicles or may not even be feasible when relying solely on chemical propulsion. The theoretical description of the flybys, referred to as gravity assists, is well established. However, there seems to be a lack of understanding of the physical processes occurring during these dynamical events. Radio-metric tracking data received from a number of spacecraft that experienced an Earth gravity assist indicate the presence of an unexpected energy change that happened during the flyby and cannot be explained by the standard methods of modern astrodynamics. This puzzling behavior of several spacecraft has become known as the flyby anomaly. We present the summary of the recent anomalous observations and discuss possible ways to resolve this puzzle.

6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication by Space Science Reviews

References in corpus (3)

• The Energy Transfer Process in Planetary Flybys
• Thermal recoil force, telemetry, and the Pioneer anomaly
• Astrometric Solar-System Anomalies

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Pioneer Anomaly
• Gravitational Anomalies in the Solar System?
• Azimuthally Symmetric Theory of Gravitation (I)
• A flyby anomaly for Juno? Not from standard physics
• The Flyby Anomaly and the Effect of a Topological Torsion Current
• Gravitation Astrometric Measurement Experiment
• Conformal Cosmology and the Pioneer Anomaly
• Effect of TTC on Satellite Orbital Mechanics
• Hyperbolic orbits of Earth flybys and effects of ungravity-inspired conservative potentials
• Observational evidence for travelling wave modes bearing distance proportional shifts
• Pioneer 10 and 11 Spacecraft Anomalous Acceleration in the light of the Nonsymmetric Kaluza-Klein (Jordan-Thiry) Theory
• The Measurement of the Hubble Constant H_0 in the Solar System