The Physics behind the NASA Flyby Anomaly

Abstract

From 1990 to 2005 NASA did six flybys of Earth in order to boost the energy of each spacecraft, enabling them to go deeper into the solar system. These six flybys showed an unexpected violation in the conservation of energy of up to 100 sigmas, matching a simple physical formula related to the input and output spacecraft velocities relative to the Earth rotational plane. Mysteriously, occasionally the effect was not present. After several years of reviewing the data and evaluating all sources of perturbation known to NASA, no solution was identified. NASA sent the final report to the author above for further review. Independently, the author’s firm Optical Physics Company had published research into the vacuum field, finding that it was not constant but varied across the Earth’s orbit and was also separately detected being radiated by the Sun. The physics we had learned was applied to the NASA passes, allowing all the anomalies they had encountered to be explained and adding considerably to our understanding of the vacuum field. We hypothesized a radially emitted vacuum field (which controls the rate of time) would couple the radial direction r with time t to add a gtr term in the metric tensor. We then combined the previously published experimental data of the vacuum field radiated by the Sun with the NASA data to develop a formula for the emission of the vacuum field from warm rotating bodies, accurate to about 1%. 25 candidate formulas were evaluated, based on powers of radial acceleration and temperature, and one was definitively selected. This research offers a linkage between the vacuum field whose spectrum is proportional to h and an effect on the metric tensor of gravity. Since both gravity and h control time rates, it seemed credible they could both affect the metric tensor.