Modelling the reflective thermal contribution to the acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft

Understand

We present an improved method to compute the radiative momentum transfer in the Pioneer 10 & 11 spacecraft that takes into account both diffusive and specular reflection.

• The method allows for more reliable results regarding the thermal acceleration of the deep-space probes, confirming previous findings.
• A parametric analysis is performed in order to set an upper and lower-bound for the thermal acceleration and its evolution with time.