Here’s one mystery, (that’s coming up to its twelfth anniversary, now), which I hope they don’t solve … but looks like they probably will. (I love a good mystery) …
“The Pioneer Anomaly” by Slava G. Turyshev · Viktor T. Toth
(Submitted on 20 Jan 2010 (v1), last revised 19 Aug 2010 (this version, v2))
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.3686
“Radio-metric Doppler tracking data received from the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft from heliocentric distances of 20-70 AU has consistently indicated the presence of a small, anomalous, blue-shifted frequency drift uniformly changing with a rate of ~6 x 10^-9 Hz/s. Ultimately, the drift was interpreted as a constant sunward deceleration of each particular spacecraft at the level of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^-10 m/s^2.
This apparent violation of the Newton's gravitational inverse-square law has become known as the Pioneer anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains unexplained.
…
As most of this information was recovered relatively recently, it was not used in the previous studies of the Pioneer anomaly, but it is critical for the new investigation.”
… Scientific language for the spacecraft have slowed down more than can be explained by theory and new data is leading the way.
Seems like every man and his dog has a hypothesis about why this is happening. We could take bets on the outcomes because it seems that this is one mystery, which good scientific research probably will solve, in our lifetimes.
Any comments/bets ?
Cheers