On March 2, 1972, on a mild Thursday on Florida’s humid Cape Canaveral Peninsula, a NASA Atlas-Centaur rocket lifted off with a 570-pound payload called Pioneer 10. Pioneer was a space probe designed to cross the belt. of asteroids and make a “flight”. -by” of Jupiter and the outer gas giants to study them. Over the next ten years, Pioneer sent out astonishing reports from the far reaches of the solar system, carrying out its mission with great success.

Then, instead of going silent as expected, Pioneer kept sending signals back to Earth. Its small nuclear generator continued to generate the 70 watts of power needed to maintain a radio link to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and this went on for decades longer than anyone thought possible. Communication was maintained daily until January 23, 2003, more than thirty years after the start of the mission. By then, the probe was twice as far from the sun as Neptune and Pluto, and Pioneer had become the first man-made object to forever leave the grip of the sun’s gravity.

The Pioneer story would have been a significant chapter in the history of science if it had ended there, but it did not. Experimental physics is full of examples of science projects designed to study one phenomenon but reveal unexpected truths about something entirely different, and the really interesting piece of Pioneer 10 history is one of them. Although he had carried out his robotic exploration of Jupiter and Saturn with skill and perseverance well beyond the call of duty (if you can apply that language to a robot), by the time he was passing the outer limits of the planetary system, it was clear to NASA that he was hundreds of thousands of miles from where the tracking software said he should be. How was that possible?

The way objects move in space, whether they are Jupiter-sized planets or small ships like Pioneer, is governed by well-known laws of physics that provide precise answers about location that can be measured in centimeters, even in the sun scale. system. For Pioneer, being millions of miles off course just wasn’t possible. No matter how you approached it, the problem just wouldn’t go away and it soon became clear that something really weird was going on. NASA scientists gave this Pioneer quirk a name; they called it “The Anomaly.”

“The Pioneering Detectives: Did a Distant Spacecraft Prove Einstein and Newton Wrong?” A recently published “Single Kindle” by Konstantin Kakaes, a gifted journalist and writer who studied physics as an undergraduate at Harvard, explores the tantalizing clues scientists uncovered while trying to explain Pioneer’s drift off course. The more they dug, the less they seemed to understand. Immersed in the space probe’s daily tracking logs of 30 years, initial and perhaps revolutionary questions began to emerge: Was the spacecraft’s errant course evidence of some new and unknown wrinkle in the fundamental laws of physics?

A spacecraft slightly blown off course may seem like an unlikely topic for deep speculation about the fundamental nature of the universe, but the obvious solutions to Pioneer’s flight drift didn’t come. However, this was a matter of “black letter” physics, and errors of this type and of this magnitude simply cannot occur.

What could be the cause of “The Anomaly”? NASA detectives didn’t seem to agree, though the list of possible culprits was long and frightening: Dark matter? Tensor-vector-scalar gravity? Collisions with gravitons? A fundamental error in Einstein’s equations?

The only thing that was clear about the questions raised by Pioneer and “The Anomaly” was that potentially groundbreaking discoveries were ahead for those brave and smart enough to tackle them successfully. This is a territory that young scientists call “new physics,” a land without maps where new Nobel laureates are sometimes found as well.

Writing in crisp, clear prose free of technical language, science writer and former Mexico City bureau chief for The Economist Konstantin Kakaes delivers a chilling scientific detective story tracing mental processes and the groundwork for those committed to unraveling this high -science riddle is at stake. Kakaes is based on extensive interviews and archival research, following the story from the initial discovery of “The Anomaly” through decades of tireless investigation, to its final conclusion. “The Pioneer Detectives” is a fascinating and definitive account of not only the pioneer anomaly, but also how scientific knowledge is made and unmade, with scientists sometimes risking their reputations and livelihoods in search of cosmic truths. .

This was a great read that kept me up very late at night. Highly recommended.