Space and Earth Sciences News

Tiny unexplained speed variationsThe unexplained speed variations are extremely small: NASA's Galileo satellite experienced an increase of just 3.9 mm/s above the expected value when it swung past Earth in December 1990. The largest unexpected variation - a boost of 13.0 mm/s - was observed with NASA's NEAR spacecraft at its Earth swingby in January 1998. On the other hand, variations seen at the swingbys of NASA's Cassini in 1999 and Messenger in 2005 were so small that they lay within the bounds of uncertainty.ESA's Rosetta has made two Earth swingbys, in 2005 and 2007. It too, experienced the strange anomaly. Frustratingly, Rosetta sped up by an unexplained 1.8 mm/s during the first passage, but experienced no slowing or speeding in 2007. No one knows what will happen on 13 November 2009 for Rosetta's third and last Earth swingby: scientists are stumped."It's a mystery as to what is happening with these gravity events. Some studies have looked for answers in new interpretations of current physics. If