Modelling the reflective thermal contribution to the acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft

Abstract

We present an improved method to compute the radiative momentum transfer in the Pioneer 10 & 11 spacecraft that takes into account both diffusive and specular reflection. The method allows for more reliable results regarding the thermal acceleration of the deep-space probes, confirming previous findings. A parametric analysis is performed in order to set an upper and lower-bound for the thermal acceleration and its evolution with time.

Version accepted for publication in Physics Letters B. 19 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables

References in corpus (3)

• High precision thermal modeling of complex systems with application to the flyby and Pioneer anomaly
• Thermal Analysis of the Pioneer Anomaly: A method to estimate radiative momentum transfer
• Independent analysis of the orbits of Pioneer 10 and 11

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• The Contribution of Thermal Effects to the Acceleration of the Deep-Space Pioneer Spacecraft