Thermal recoil force, telemetry, and the Pioneer anomaly

Understand

Precision navigation of spacecraft requires accurate knowledge of small forces, including the recoil force due to anisotropies of thermal radiation emitted by spacecraft systems.

• We develop a formalism to derive the thermal recoil force from the basic principles of radiative heat exchange and energy-momentum conservation.
• The thermal power emitted by the spacecraft can be computed from engineering data obtained from flight telemetry, which yields a practical approach to incorporate the thermal recoil force into precision spacecraft navigation.
• Alternatively, orbit determination can be used to estimate the contribution of the thermal recoil force.