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Authors: Michael Brooks
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John Anderson’s opinion. Nieto made the call.
“Well, there is this Pioneer thing,” Anderson said.
Once he had picked himself up off the floor, Nieto began to talk widely about the issue. Which is how Slava Turyshev got the
Pioneer bug.
Turyshev has the distinction of being the first Soviet scientist to be employed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
in Pasadena, California. When he came across Nieto’s story, he had been invited over to do some work on his specialist subject,
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the equations that describe how matter and energy shape the universe. He was only
supposed to be in California for a year, and he thought that would be plenty of time to sort out this Pioneer nonsense. Fifteen
years later, he is still there—and heading the investigation into the anomaly.
IF he had followed his first love, Slava Turyshev would have ended up an engineer, not a theorist specializing in general relativity.
He grew up in a remote region of the Altai Mountains in what is now Kazakhstan; Turyshev’s childhood was spent within viewing
distance of the cosmodrome at Baikonur, the place where human spaceflight began. It was from here that Yuri Gagarin had been
hurled into space in 1961. This was the 1970s, and the Soviets had become expert in spaceflight. From the balcony of his family
home, the young Turyshev would watch in awe as the needle-sharp rockets pierced the sky. On treks up into the mountains, he
and his father would sometimes come across shattered metal debris. He knew exactly what it was; he had watched the second-stage
rockets being jettisoned in a cloud of gas a couple of minutes after launch, and falling back to Earth like Lucifer expelled
from heaven.
Inspired by the Soviet space program, he and his friends began to make their own rockets. Turyshev, now in his forties, is
proudest of “Ultraphoton,” a two-stage rocket he built with his cousin. It was seven feet tall and was powered by a homemade
gunpowder charge: sulphur scraped from scavenged matches. A glass Christmas tree bulb provided a suitable container for the
charge; the ignition spark came courtesy of a 4.5-volt battery at the end of a one-hundred-foot length of wire. The launch
was spectacular, he says. The heartbeat of his passenger—the young Turyshev’s pet mouse—must have gone off the scale.
Everything was shaping up for Turyshev to become a space engineer. But when he was sixteen, someone showed him the equations
for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And that was that. Somehow building rockets suddenly seemed a childish passion;
the warp and weft of space and time, the mysterious fabric on which planets and people played out their dramas, seemed a far
more fitting object for his attention.
By 1990 Turyshev had equipped himself with a PhD in astrophysics and theoretical gravity physics from Moscow State University.
Three years later, he left for California.
TURYSHEV first came into the Pioneer project as the fixer—the cleaner. Like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction , he was there to clear up the mess after people had done something stupid. Something stupid, in this context, was to have
forgotten to factor in some subtle but important aspect of general relativity, Einstein’s gravitational theory, in the planning
of the Pioneer missions. But, to his surprise, Turyshev couldn’t find anything wrong. And that is how his ongoing obsession
with solving the Pioneer problem began.
Anderson, Nieto, and Turyshev all think they must have missed something. They don’t want to rewrite the laws of physics; they
want to leave Newton and Einstein alone. The trouble is, a massive analysis has failed to find anything on the spacecraft
that could be causing it to drift off course. In 2002 they published a fifty-five-page paper together, going through everything
they could think of to explain the drift. Nothing fit. And that was after
“Well, there is this Pioneer thing,” Anderson said.
Once he had picked himself up off the floor, Nieto began to talk widely about the issue. Which is how Slava Turyshev got the
Pioneer bug.
Turyshev has the distinction of being the first Soviet scientist to be employed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
in Pasadena, California. When he came across Nieto’s story, he had been invited over to do some work on his specialist subject,
Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the equations that describe how matter and energy shape the universe. He was only
supposed to be in California for a year, and he thought that would be plenty of time to sort out this Pioneer nonsense. Fifteen
years later, he is still there—and heading the investigation into the anomaly.
IF he had followed his first love, Slava Turyshev would have ended up an engineer, not a theorist specializing in general relativity.
He grew up in a remote region of the Altai Mountains in what is now Kazakhstan; Turyshev’s childhood was spent within viewing
distance of the cosmodrome at Baikonur, the place where human spaceflight began. It was from here that Yuri Gagarin had been
hurled into space in 1961. This was the 1970s, and the Soviets had become expert in spaceflight. From the balcony of his family
home, the young Turyshev would watch in awe as the needle-sharp rockets pierced the sky. On treks up into the mountains, he
and his father would sometimes come across shattered metal debris. He knew exactly what it was; he had watched the second-stage
rockets being jettisoned in a cloud of gas a couple of minutes after launch, and falling back to Earth like Lucifer expelled
from heaven.
Inspired by the Soviet space program, he and his friends began to make their own rockets. Turyshev, now in his forties, is
proudest of “Ultraphoton,” a two-stage rocket he built with his cousin. It was seven feet tall and was powered by a homemade
gunpowder charge: sulphur scraped from scavenged matches. A glass Christmas tree bulb provided a suitable container for the
charge; the ignition spark came courtesy of a 4.5-volt battery at the end of a one-hundred-foot length of wire. The launch
was spectacular, he says. The heartbeat of his passenger—the young Turyshev’s pet mouse—must have gone off the scale.
Everything was shaping up for Turyshev to become a space engineer. But when he was sixteen, someone showed him the equations
for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And that was that. Somehow building rockets suddenly seemed a childish passion;
the warp and weft of space and time, the mysterious fabric on which planets and people played out their dramas, seemed a far
more fitting object for his attention.
By 1990 Turyshev had equipped himself with a PhD in astrophysics and theoretical gravity physics from Moscow State University.
Three years later, he left for California.
TURYSHEV first came into the Pioneer project as the fixer—the cleaner. Like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction , he was there to clear up the mess after people had done something stupid. Something stupid, in this context, was to have
forgotten to factor in some subtle but important aspect of general relativity, Einstein’s gravitational theory, in the planning
of the Pioneer missions. But, to his surprise, Turyshev couldn’t find anything wrong. And that is how his ongoing obsession
with solving the Pioneer problem began.
Anderson, Nieto, and Turyshev all think they must have missed something. They don’t want to rewrite the laws of physics; they
want to leave Newton and Einstein alone. The trouble is, a massive analysis has failed to find anything on the spacecraft
that could be causing it to drift off course. In 2002 they published a fifty-five-page paper together, going through everything
they could think of to explain the drift. Nothing fit. And that was after
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