Planetary Radar Ranging Residuals

Precision radar ranging to Solar System bodies — planets, asteroids, and spacecraft — provides sub-centimeter measurements of interplanetary distances and has been used to constrain possible time variations of fundamental constants, extra dimensions, and modifications to gravity at solar-system scales. Residuals between observed radar ranges and the predictions of solar system ephemerides based on GR have been analyzed for anomalous secular trends. The Pioneer anomaly — an unexplained constant sunward acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft — was ultimately resolved as a thermal radiation pressure effect, but the saga demonstrated that subtle unmodeled forces at the nanoNewton level can accumulate detectably over multi-decade baselines. More recent analyses of ranging residuals to Mars orbiters and Mercury have searched for signatures of dark matter, modified gravity, or cosmological acceleration at solar-system scales.

Successive Collision Theory makes a specific and small prediction for solar system ranging residuals through the hereditary time transmission mechanism. The proper time rate within the Solar System is determined by the product of SR and GR correction factors accumulated through the full nested frame hierarchy: solar potential, galactic potential, Local Group potential, supercluster potential, and the parent frames beyond our horizon. The SCT prediction is that the local expansion rate Λ_eff, which is enhanced within the KBC supervoid, contributes a small but non-zero term to the effective gravitational potential experienced by bodies within the Solar System — not because cosmological expansion directly acts on bound systems in GR, but because the temporal evolution of the parent frame's gravitational binding strength propagates downward through the hereditary time chain and modifies local clock rates at the fractional level. This manifests as a secular drift in the effective gravitational constant G_eff at the level of dG/G/dt ~ Λ_eff/c² × H₀, far below current measurement precision but potentially detectable with next-generation ephemerides.

The SCT tensor mesh dissipation mechanism also predicts a very small but coherent perturbation to solar system dynamics from the orbital decay of the Milky Way's orbit within the Local Group, and of the Local Group within the Virgo supercluster. As the parent frame orbits decay over cosmic time, the gravitational potential experienced at solar system scales changes at the level determined by the rate of orbital energy loss in each parent frame. This is a secular effect — not an oscillatory perturbation — and it contributes to the anomalous secular acceleration term that ranging analyses seek. While the amplitude is below current detectability, SCT provides a clear theoretical prediction for its magnitude and direction, distinguishing it from the random noise that would be produced by dark matter substructure or other stochastic perturbation sources.