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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.
...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
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
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.
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.
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'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); }
And Voyager 2 has passed Voyager 1.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.