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Pioneer 10 Finally Dead After 28 Years?
BorgiaPope writes: "Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix writes a sad, elegiac piece in Slate about the apparent final silence of Pioneer 10, launched in 1972 and now more than 7 billion miles from Earth. For the past five years, SETI scientists at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have used the incredibly faint signals from Pioneer 10 to test the functionality of their noise filtering gear. Alas, Tarter reports that Pioneer 10 hasn't been heard from for several days now. The incredibly hardy, long-lived satellite, which long ago surpassed NASA's wildest expectations for its power supplies and other systems, may finally have drifted peacefully into eternal slumber . . . ." I think the Klingons got it.
Back in the seventies Nasa made beautiful, functional and sturdy spacecraft which would work for many years without fail.
These days we get probes that are so blind that they crash into planets.
Find funky gifts
...and you think you've got uptime!
Seriously, it's a testament to the engineering skill of the people who built, launched and operated this particular piece of machinery. Amazing work!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Pioneer 10 Instruments
Helium Vector Magnetometer (F)
Plasma Analyzer (P/L)
Charged Particle Instrument
Cosmic Ray Telescope
Geiger Tube Telescope
Trapped Radiation Detector (P/L)
Meteoroid Detector (ENC)(F)
Asteroid-Meteoroid Experiment (ENC)(F)
Ultraviolet Photometer
Imaging Photopolarimeter (ENC) (P/L)
Infrared Radiometer (F)
(this info comes from here, which also has info on it's brother pioneer 11, which died in Dec '95)
Because 99.99999% of it's users shut it down each night when they go to bed? Nobody CARES if the OS stays up for more than 49 days or not. We run Linux on most servers at work, NT on the workstations and I run Win98SE at home. Crashing is not a problem on ANY of these OS's. I can't understand how people have the energy to talk about it over and over and over and OVER again. I'm *MUCH* more interested in what kind of applications are avaiable and what I can do with those (or our clients). User friendliness has NOTHING to do with if the OS stays up for 49 days or not - for a server sure, but not for a client OS.
And it has absolutely nothing at all to do with a space probe.
Would you buy a car which was doomed to crash after 49 days, so long as the manufacture provided a patch for it?
If the car ran for 49 CONSECUTIVE DAYS without turning off the engine, I wouldn't care if it would crash after that. I - myself - only run for about 48 hours straight and after that I can shut off my computer. In any case, you're comparing apples to oranges.
From the NASA Website:
s /pioneer/PNimgs/Plaque.gif
"
We expect Pioneer to last an indeterminate period of time, probably outlasting its home planet, the Earth. In 5 billion years, the Sun will become a red giant, expand, envelop the orbit of the Earth, and consume it. Pioneer will still be out there in interstellar space. Erosional processes in the interstellar environment are largely unknown, but are very likely less efficient than erosion within the solar system, where a characteristic erosion rate, due largely to micrometeoritic pitting, is of the order of 1 Angstrom/yr. Thus a plate etched to a depth ~ 0.01 cm should survive recognizable at least to as distance ~ 10 parsecs, and most probably to 100 parsecs. Accordingly, Pioneer 10 and any etched metal message aboard it are likely to survive for much longer periods than any of the works of Man on Earth.
"
A picture of the plaque:
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Project
That made me think, I hope you share the experience.
Defraggle
Head monkey
Dynamic League of discord POEE Cabal "Monkey"
God, I feel microscopic
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Ah, the uptimes you could get on an Intel chip before the days of Windows...
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
Chances are not very good.
The problem is that the transmissions from Pioneer 10 are already just a smidge above the noise threshold for the receiving equipment. Even if things had gone exactly as planned, we'd have still lost contact with it next year.
It's amazing to think about the probe. It's the furthest any of our technology has travelled away from us.
It's still out there now, in the cold, cold, cold of space. It is truly swimming in a sea of stars. The Sun is barely brighter than the other stars in the sharp blackness. It still listening for the whispers of its masters, still waiting at their command. However, it can no longer hear from the people who have cared about it so much. It is all alone now. So far, far away from home.
As the years go on, it's heart, the RTG, will slowly cool, and the bus voltage will drop. At some point, the heartbeat of it's system clock will stop, and the little probe will sleep for eternity. Asleep among the stars.
It had a finite lifespan , accept it and move on
-- Oh Well
Combining those two factors, by the time we have the capability to retrieve an object from deep space, the amount of deep space we'll have to search to find them will be just too big, unless we get really exotic and have technologies like endless quantities of nanospaceships with surveillance gear, perhaps.
Could somebody with more background in this stuff please comment?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
At least one "FBC" project exceeded it's design lifetime by (as I recall) a factor of 4.
Mars Pathfinder's wee little cutie Sojourner rover had a design lifetime of 1 week (or was it 14 days, I can't recall). It ran for the best part of 2 months, and indeed it's believed Soujourner outlived the Pathfinder (renamed Sagan Station) home base which suffered a transmitter failure... Apparently, the fallback method of regaining contact was for Soujourner to "orbit" Pathfinder at a fixed distance (10 metres?) constantly re-trying to connect; it's been speculated that when we finally get to Mars we might find a deep circular track worn in the dust by Sojourner's continuous circuits...
A nice idea, but highly improbable.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
and even if it were, we probably wouldn't be able
to tell. Theres a difference between *dead* and
a signal so faint that any misalignment makes it
impossible to receive.
Pioneer 10
(Launched 2 March 1972)
Distance from Sun (1 October 2000): 76.18 AU Speed relative to the Sun: 12.24 km/sec (27,380 mph) Distance from Earth: 11.34 billion
kilometers (7.047 billion miles) Round-trip Light Time: 21 hours 00 minutes
The latest Pioneer activity was on September 10, when DSS 63 tracked the spacecraft. The station was not able to acquire the downlink.
However, there was a report of two momentary receiver glitches at the Pioneer 10 frequency. This report was encouraging, since it means that
the spacecraft signal is there, but it is still off Earth point. The Earth look angle (ELA) is estimated to be over 1.4 degrees. The downlink signal
strength drops off rapidly after 1.0 degree. The Earth is just starting to go back towards the PN 10 spin axis. As the year continues, the Earth
will be closer in alignment with the spacecraft pointing and the tracking stations should be able to regain lock. We anticipate this to be about
the middle of December. Our latest calculation of the ephemeris yields: Right Ascension = 76.27 degrees, Declination = 25.91 degrees.
Since Pioneer 10 is over 75 AU distant and its telemetry signal is virtually at the limit of overall communication system's link margin, the
spacecraft was chosen as a convenient test vehicle for the new methodology of Chaos theory. Chaotic.com has been testing the applicability of
new methods in semi-blind signal estimation and noise reduction using Pioneer 10 signals. From the latest progress report by Richard. R.
Holland of chaotic.com, there are two main areas of development: algorithm development and data analysis. Currently NASA and JPL are
working with chaos.com to resolve issues regarding the data analysis. Keep tuned to this web-site for future progress reports on chaos theory
and Pioneer 10.
8 miles a second. Here's a stupid thought. It's moving at 8 miles a second. How do you catch it on the other end, to look at it? If it hits anything, it's destroyed, no doubt about it, so that information plate that's on it(if that wasn't a voyager only thing) is destroyed. So you have to have technology capable of hunting this thing down by accelerating to its speed, and then grabbing it, and slowing it down. If one of these wandered through our solar system, we'd have a hell of a time catching it, even with todays technology, no?
Btw, not everyone believes in some "Lord" who created the universe. I certainly dont.
;-)
Right on. I'm firmly belive that the universe its just the inside of a giant marble, being played with by aliens. Well, it's just as sensible a theory as all the crackpot religious ones, ain't it?
--
Even if we could recover it, I don't think anyone should.
For the reason why, read this.
Thad
Thad
DS1 is solar powered... not really much hope for it much beyond jupiter or so (and even thats really pushing it)... Deep space missions basically require nuclear energy sources, no other alternatives exist.
One of the Pioneers (and I beleive it was 10)
was launched on my birthday in 1972 (Mar 2). I've always sortof identified with it. Though I suppose we're obviously not life-force linked in some odd sci-fi way, because I'm still typ
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
It wasn't Pioneer 10, it was one of the Voyager probes (ST TPM listed some number > 2 as the total number of Voyager problems that NASA was supposed to have launched, but I believe we in reality only launched 2).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Our airplane fleet is indeed quite old (dangerously old according to many), but remember that these airplanes are constantly inspected and repaired... Pioneer 10 hasn't been seen by anyone since it was launched.
It's longevity is due to it's simplistic design and it's RTG power sources. The most likely reason for it's (suspected) failure is the final exausting of those RTGs. The voltage has just finally dropped below the absolute minimum necessary to power the transmitter. It's been running very close to the limit for the last several years...
First of all, why does Microsoft have to be mentioned in *EVERY SINGLE* story no matter how little the story has to do with Microsoft? Second, the site you linked to has a PATCH for the problem. There are problems with all software - the point is if they are fixed or not. This one has been fixed years ago so what's your problem? You don't think there has been problems in other OS's and software? You're just making you and the open source community look dumb with comments like that!
The NASA web site on the Pioneer projects is fascinating. 'http://spac epr ojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PNStat
Also interesting is an image of the plaque on-board Pioneer, 'http:
For a while, I was an officer in an attempt to revive SEDS (the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) at the University of Texas at Austin. Our faculty sponsor was Aerospace Engineering professor Dr. Hans Mark, who was also the deputy head of NASA at the time Pioneer 10 was shipped off.
;)
At the time, the engineers wanted to use the latest and greatest technology in Pioneer 10 -- a tape recorder -- to increase its data rate by an order of magnitude. He shot down the idea, because he wanted no moving parts in Pioneer 10.
The much-vaunted tape recorder device the young engineers wanted to use later failed after very brief forays in the next few projects, but Pioneer 10 has been around for all this time. All of science benefits from that decision.
The moral of the story to young engineers is clear: The latest isn't always the greatest. Sometimes you should sacrifice "bigger, better, faster" for reliability.
It's neat that Pioneer 10 lasted so long. I'm sorry to see it go. Of course, now that the Psychlos have it, they'll be after us for all of our gold, and it'll be another thousand years before we reclaim our planet and destroy Psychlo, but it'll all be worth it in the end.
It's the furthest any of our technology has travelled away from us
Not quite...I've read that last year sometime, Voyager 1 passed Pioneer 10 as the most distant craft...
Doh!
From what I could find.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
After reading the article on the front page, I'd like to know at what point the poster as well as /. was able to leap to the conclusion that the P10 was dead. Even the article (diary) didn't come to such a conclusion. As an avid follower of space news (though many believe it a waste of money, even /. at times) I was disappointed to be mislead by the news 'tip' and the irrational jump to a conclusion derived from the fact that the SETI team at first got a signal then determined that it was from their equipment to mean that P10 was dead in the water. This is a helluva jump.
/. doesn't seems to research submitted news tips the way they should for the number of devout daily readers.
:)
There are a number of reasons why SETI equipment, even the Aracibo hardware did not pick it up, most of which have been touched on in previous comments. The problem as I see it is a premature conclusion from one reader and slashdot newsposters not reading the article submitted before posting, thereby leading to a loss in life (mine) rebutting said article.
Lastly, in the e-tip posted on the front page, there were MANY inaccuracies concerning the article, most of which were derived, of course by the tipsters imagination, on a single paragraph. If I'm correct, the posters paraphrase on said paragraph was twice the size of the original. My only real gripe here is not the fact that this is important, its not, the P10 will not really give us much data that we can use for the next few lifetimes if operational, but that a great site like
Please feel free to slam a 1 one me
And Voyager 2 has passed Voyager 1.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
According to the NASA Voyager Page, Voyager 1 is further out than Voyager 2 (scroll down to the stats)
Doh!
Please reread Matusushita's comment above. This whole thing is premature. From the project status page at http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/p ioneer/PNStat.html :
The latest Pioneer activity was on September 10, when DSS 63 tracked the spacecraft. The station was not able to acquire the downlink. However, there was a report of two momentary receiver glitches at the Pioneer 10 frequency. This report was encouraging, since it means that the spacecraft signal is there, but it is still off Earth point. The Earth look angle (ELA) is estimated to be over 1.4 degrees. The downlink signal strength drops off rapidly after 1.0 degree. The Earth is just starting to go back towards the PN 10 spin axis. As the year continues, the Earth will be closer in alignment with the spacecraft pointing and the tracking stations should be able to regain lock. We anticipate this to be about the middle of December. Our latest calculation of the ephemeris yields: Right Ascension = 76.27 degrees, Declination = 25.91 degrees.
8 miles a second.
That's not unusual. Just remember, the thing that Voyager 10 flew very close to a planet or two that weighed several trillion trillion trillion tons. In the gravitational interaction between Voyager and, say, Jupiter, some of Jupiter's momentum was lost, which was Voyager's gain. The loss is not measurable by any equipment we have yet devised, but the effect on Voyager was spectacular, accelerating it to.... fancy that... around 8 miles a second. Go Newton!
no, that would be "ah-aaaah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhh.... oh-ah-aaaah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.... ah-aaah-ah-ah-ah-u-u-u-aah-AAAAH-aah-aah... aaah-aaah".
After careful reflection I would be inclined to agree with you. I still haven't figured out how to work in the percussion though (which is essential for the whole opening credits experience). Maybe I could insert a text block that sounded right when printed on a loud dot-matrix? Hmm....
--8<--
--8<--
Oh, traveller Bold into the blackness you spread the light. In shroud of yourself sail the distance between the stars.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
Bold into the blackness
you spread the light.
In shroud of yourself
sail the distance between the stars.
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
It would make a pretty impressive museum piece - the first man made object to go out of the solar system, and them come back agin!
So, if it failed to reposition itself, is there a chance that its signal will be picked up again within a year from now, when the earth moves back into the path of the signals?
That's possible, but unlikely. I haven't gone to the trouble of reading the article, but I can come up with three different ways they could have lost communication with the probe:
1. Transmitter failure.
2. Rotational jets (or whatever it uses to aim itself) failure.
3. Nudged off course/damaged by a chunk of rock (aka meteor/astroid).
I suppose that mainstream media will cover this somewhat, considering the number of years that the thing worked perfectly and the historical role it played.
--
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
I suppose that mainstream media will cover this somewhat, considering the number of years that the thing worked perfectly and the historical role it played.
Yeah, right. This was a spectacular success, not a spectacular failure. Maybe a blurb on page 28...
Because you are off topic. I wanted to read about a space probe - not an operating system review where you say nothing that hasn't been said 1000 times before. "M$ sucks"
I'm not saying Windows (the 9x-series in particular) is a great OS - it's not. It's however nowhere near as bad as people seem to think here on Slashdot. For instance, like I said, I run Win98SE at home by choice. I have several Linux distros in my bookshelf, OS2/Warp4 and I could install Win2K if I wanted to. I've thought about Corel Linux.. But I'm still running Win98SE.. Why? Because it runs every single app I need and crashing is not a problem. I honestly can't rememeber when the OS would have crashed for me.. It's not a big deal for me and certainly not for the millions of "less than power users" out there.. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying "expect less! lower the quality". Once we get apps such as Photoshop, Premiere and IE for Linux, I'll be more than happy to switch!
Last time I asked a friend who is studying these objects, he said that their characteristic is that they are mainly outside the orbit of Neptune, which is at about 30 AU. Where's Pluto? 40 AU? Anyway, it may be that there are Kuiper belt objects further out than this, but I think they generally have them a bit closer, but don't take my word for it.
However, the termination shock is believed to be about that distance (in my undergrad courses, a back-of-an-envelope calculation said 75AU, it's obviously inaccurate), but it is heading in the wrong direction, but Voayger may go through it.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
In other news, the Automobile Association announced that it would be reviewing the terms of its contract with customers. Under discussion is clause 12a, which reads:
12.a. The AA shall guarantee vehicle recovery and repair no matter the location and environmental conditions.An AA spokeperson said 'We will honour our existing contracts, but in future we may have to ask for an extra callout fee, depending on location.' The spokesperson refused to comment on the current state of NASA's account.
You forgot that advances in technology are now also applied to advances in management. So engineers instead of doing their jobs are making sure their KPIs are right, progress reports are on time and their meetings booked in MS Outlook. Do not expect the newer version to be more stable and more durable than the old one. These times are long gone. And it is really really sad.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Because it doesn't revolve around the Sun or Earth or any other body. Well, I am not sure if it rotates around the cente of our Galaxy or is able to leave its gravitation field as well.
Down below it was pointed out that NASA is hoping for just that.p ioneer/PNStat.html
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Intel Outside... The Solar System!
/. ID is lower than the real Bruce Perens'.
The real Threed's
--Threed
Its a another sad day for the space race.
I was lucky enough to see it as it left this world.
Its sad that its first mission is over but it still may complete its final mission of telling others about who created it.
Sleep Pioneer, you've got a long way to go.
I believe he's refering to this gem. It's about 7.3 megs though.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
It's orbiting the center of the galaxy.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Da Daaa da da da da Daaa.. Da da da da Daaa Daaa da da DAAAA da da da da Daaaaahhh.... Daaa da da da dadadada Daaaaaaaaadaaaa da da DA Da da dada DAAAA!!
What the fruck is this supposed to be?
It's the Star Trek theme from the OLD show! Don't you remember the Nomad episode?
--8<--
--8<--
It is truly hard to believe that this probe operated for 28 years and is in fact now 7 billion miles away from Earth. Let's consider the facts here: Earth's average distance from the sun is 93 million miles. Pluto, the furthermost planet, is on average a whopping 3.67 billion miles from the sun. Basically, this probe is 3.24 billion miles outside of our solar system and around 7.09 billion miles from our sun.
These figures are pretty impressive. Now let's do some more math. I'm no mathmatician so please feel free to contradict me. Here we go: It took 28 years for this probe to go 7 billion miles. So this means the probe travels 250 million miles per year. This would then translate into 684,932 miles per day or 28,539 mph. Let's be even more specific - this would factor out to 476 miles per minute or 8 miles per second. Now, that's a speedy craft isn't it? Your numbers may differ, as I divided 7,000,000,000 by 28 and divided that by 365 and I didn't factor in leap years and I rounded the numbers off just for convenience sakes. Nonetheless, when you break it down it is pretty cool.
Isn't it great to know that even after the roaches reach out into space a tiny little picture of man and a woman will still hang out there.
Rest in peace little guy, we're all riding with you.
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
Actually, the pride and sound engineering you are talking about are not the main cause of Pioneer 10's extended lifetime.
The main cause is that we did not know what the space environment was like, so we built that spacecraft like a tank. It could have been a much more sophisticated spacecraft if we had known more, but instead it was built like a tank.
The other main factor was Pioneer's source of power: four radioisotope thermoelectric generators.
A little spacecraft
far away among the stars
rest well, pioneer
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
28 years of operation, that is simply increadible!
I can't help but wonder if today's "Cheaper Better Faster" projects will last beyond their specs. Pioneer 10 like so much science before it has provided benifits that the originators never would have forseen.
To the engineers and scientists that built it, I take my hat of too you.
When it absolutely positively has to be there.
what is happening right now is the probe is being used as spare parts by a highly advanced AI robot probe. The two will merge and become something more powerful than any of it's creators ever imagined...
Da Daaa da da da da Daaa.. Da da da da Daaa Daaa da da DAAAA da da da da Daaaaahhh.... Daaa da da da dadadada Daaaaaaaaadaaaa da da DA Da da dada DAAAA!!
5 year mission, eh? I engineering projects are always behind schedule in the future too!
--8<--
--8<--
I find it sad that the current administration at NASA are such small thinkers, who have no sense of the vast grandeur that is out there for the taking. What has happened to the days of projects which could excite the layman and scientist alike?
Sure, they've had their budget cut, but that's no excuse for their playing it safe attitude which has led to public apathy and even more budget cuts. And without someone taking an interest in space, how will we ever see all that the Lord has created?
Personally I think that NASA need to get back into the race for the stars before either the Europeans or the Chinese succeed where we have failed for a lack of drive and a sense of wonder. Surely we don't want the first men on Mars to plant the red flag of communism on such a brave new world?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Have you no soul?
Is your heart made of brass?
Have you no shame?
Then kiss my...
How can you say what you did and then claim it had a finite lifespan? There's some logical inconsistency there.
Its a pile of wires. But its loss is our own just as the wonders we saw through its instruments were.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
AIAA article
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
--
It seems that Pioneer 10's antenna pointing mechanism is not working well enough at the moment to accurately point its high-gain antenna at Earth. (It's apparently more than 1.4 degrees off, but we'll move into its beam again as the earth continues to orbit the sun -- projected time of reacquisition is December.) Once signal is reacquired, we'll see if JPL is able to fix the problem somehow, or if we'll be reduced to contacting Pioneer 10 only during certain times of the year when we happen to be within its signal cone.
Just a thought, but I hope that if we ever recover it as a symbol of us triumphing over the tyranny of astronomical distances, that it'd be placed into a museum (how much would the Smithsonian pay for this one?) or installed at the front of the UN. Perhaps there should be discussion - albeit farfetched for now - like those currently about the moon-landing site about drafting laws declaring them as historical monuments.
A HREF="http://www.debianplanet.org">DebianPlanet
-- "I can't tell the future, I just work there." -- The Doctor
"The incredibly hardy, long-lived satellite, which long ago surpassed NASA's wildest expectations for its power supplies and other systems, may finally have drifted peacefully into eternal slumber . . .
<sigh>
We've been through some things together
With trunks of memories still to come
We found things to do in stormy weather
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes have come
With your chrome heart shining in the sun
Long may you run.
- Neil Young, Long May You Run
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
So, if it failed to reposition itself, is there a chance that its signal will be picked up again within a year from now, when the earth moves back into the path of the signals?
I usually aren't sentimental about non-sentient and man-made things, but somehow the image of being so unbelieveably far from the place of origin and from anything else is quite moving. In addition, it managed to survive far longer than anyone initially expected and gathered far more information than planned. All in all, it deserves respect and a place in the history of space exploration.
But there are still other probes out there, maybe they will even manage to survive as long or longer. I certainly wish so; we won't get anything new so far in near future and there are mysteries like where the influence of sun ends and interstellar space really beings to solve...
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.