Despite recent reports, NASA is now reporting that its Cassini spacecraft is not experiencing any deviations in its orbit around Saturn that cannot be explained be current models, suggesting that it is not being affected by the hypothetical Planet Nine.
Over the past couple of days, several news stories have suggested that an anomaly in Cassini's orbit around Saturn could stem from the gravitational pull of the mysterious ninth planet that might lie at the outer edges of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune. Now, Cassini's mission navigators are putting this theory to rest.
"An undiscovered planet outside the orbit of Neptune, 10 times the mass of Earth, would affect the orbit of Saturn, not Cassini," said William Folkner, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who develops planetary orbit information that is used for NASA's high-precision spacecraft navigations.
"This could produce a signature in the measurements of Cassini while in orbit about Saturn if the planet was close enough to the sun," he added. "But we do not see any unexplained signature above the level of the measurement noise in Cassini data taken from 2004 to 2016."
Fueling the speculation, a recent paper suggested that data tracking of Cassini's position up to the year 2020 could be used to pinpoint the most probable location of the planet. However, the Cassini mission is planned to end in 2017, when it will crash into Saturn's atmosphere due to a lack of fuel.
"Although we'd love it if Cassini could help detect a new planet in the solar system, we do not see any perturbations in our orbit that we cannot explain with our current models," said Earl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA's JPL.
The existence of Planet Nine was proposed back in January by planetary scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, who believe that the unexpected behavior of some of the icy Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) is due to a relationship with a large, nearby object that could be a ninth planet.
Since Batygin and Brown's initial hypothesis, numerous other scientists have begun working on narrowing down the location of the hypothetical planet, although as of now, the Cassini spacecraft's Saturn mission doesn't seem like it will be any help in this process.
