Scientists are eagerly anticipating the ROSETTA probe’s next pass of Earth, because they know that something they don’t know about might happen. Probes passing by Earth to pick up a gravitational slingshot have been experiencing unexplained extra accelerations, and the reasons could reveal fundamental facts of existence – if we ever work them out.
The discrepancies are tiny, mere millimeters per second compared to the total value of many thousands of meters a second, but the thing about rocket scientists is they don’t just wave their hand and go “Ah, it’s just off a bit.” In fact the entire existence of rocket science as more than a field of explosion craters is based on that fact. These minuscule movement changes have apparently randomly sped or slowed satellites for the last few decades, and some very smart people want to know why.
Don’t dismiss this as some simple error in the calculations or hardware: experts have been picking this phenomena apart for over twenty years, and have discounted all the usual suspects. Anything at all surviving space implies a mastery of “not forgetting minor details”, and nothing known can explain what’s going on. More esoteric explanations involve everything from dark matter, the cosmological calculation cure-all, to alterations in our understanding of spacetime. Or, of course, just missing something.
What’s more, this is just the sort of experiment to reveal it. The laurels (and lunatics) around the LHC make many forget that the most important discovers aren’t from multi-billion megasperiments but the identification and analysis of the little niggles and odd phenomena. The entire science of quantum mechanics comes from one curve which wouldn’t work out, and entire new particles have been isolated from almost-ignorable blips in the data.
It’s awesome that Rosetta can help probe the rest of the universe as a side effect on the way to its real mission, catching a comet and collecting data in 2014.
Luke McKinney
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/11/12/esa.spacecraft.may.help.unravel.cosmic.mystery
