Monday, March 2, 2009

Passing through and flying by

As long as I am just passing through life, I may as well offer an explanation for another gravity puzzle called the "flyby anomaly."

Various spacecraft, including Galileo and NEAR,  have accelerated faster than expected when exiting from their slingshot maneuvers around the Earth.  Using this manueaver, scientists give spacecraft gravity boosts into space. The unexpected acceleration has been called the "flyby anomaly" because current gravity theories do not explain the phenomenon.

So I'll throw in my two cents, suggesting again that gravity is an effect of matter moving through space. In this case, the Earth is accelerating as it approaches the Sun and creating a deeper gravity well in spacetime. As a result, the spacecraft are falling into the gravity well and then are getting a bigger slingshot boost than Newtonian physics would suggest.

Of course, this is just a flyby explanation of these phenomenon. I have not given it serious thought. But it seems to me that if the principal theory is true, then this explanation should be true so long as I have applied the theory correctly.