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NASA To Contact Its Oldest Spacecraft
BugBBQ writes: "This is very "Space:1999 UltraProbe" kinda-kool...
NASA will attempt to contact its oldest spacecraft, Pioneer-6, launched in 1965! (yikes! that's the year I was born for crying out loud! which I'm sure I did at the time)). p.s.: Anyone who gets the Space:1999 ref is welcome to e-mail me" This bird has been spinning through space for a long time.
Could you imagine the uptime!!
uptime 12764 days, 04:25, 1 user
Pioneer 6 is in solar orbit at 0.74 AU
Pioneer 10 has left the solar system, and is 7 billion miles away
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The article doesn't mention this, so in case anyone was wondering. The last time this spacecraft was contacted was in October of 1997.
- from
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Yes, but we know that time travel can be achieved by attaining the exact speed of 88 mph (plus a flux capacitor)...so maybe we launched it yesterday, it went back 7 billion years in time, and now we are just trying to contact it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
NASA is open about such things, but based on my experience with the UARS satellite, much of the protocols were one shot solutions applicable only to the particular mission or mission family. If the thing's still up and running you've got a good shot of getting everything on the web. However, if it's been shut down for more than a couple of years, they probably tossed the binders containing the documentation. That was a big problem even on a working project like HRDI and UARS were during the early 90s. Namely it had been running for a several years already, the software was getting long in the tooth and it needed updating. A lot of my job was tweaking legacy code to to bring it in line with language updates and whatnot. Its really frustrating to be able to find no documentation whatsoever on a critical piece of running code. And, thats from the programmer's point of view. I don't wanna think about ther operations engineers would have done if they had to restart it. Anyway, searching for lost documentation would be an original science history project. It'd also be fun to go through the old software archives and take a peek at the code. Mind you for something this old who knows how its stored--punch cards? It kinda gives the creeps to know that someday a historian may draw an image of me based solely on a bunch kludgy Fortran 66 and VAX DCL programs.
What are they going to say? "Ground Control To Major Tom"
As any geek would be, I would be interested to know what kind of hardware was used to build that thing, especially considering when it was built. I also wonder what the protocol is used to download data from the spacecraft, doubt anyone would know, except NASA people, considering it would be proprietary.
"...originally launched on what was to have been a fleeting six-month mission to measure the solar wind, solar magnetic field and cosmic rays."
My additional question is what practical use it's information would have today, with all the monitoring equipment we have on Earth and have sent into orbit. Keep in mind it does have the advantage of not being obstructed by Earth's weather nor any other Earthly obstructions because it's in a solar oribt.
ping -i 36667
Some of these older space probes are still producing useful data. Check out Mit's Space Plasma web page. Voyager 2 is alive and well and producing data which is being actively studied. It should be passing the heliopause soon and then really be out beyond the system. Its hard to keep interest and funding up for these old guys, but it is well worth the effort.
The other pioneers 10 & 11 faint signals are used
to test SETI equipment. I recall one of the two
becoming undetectable recently.
If it's seven billion light years away, then that might explain why my pings to it always timeout. :)
(I think you meant seven billion here, not seven billion light years. One LY = 6 trillion miles/9 trillion KM, if I recall correctly. I really, really doubt that Pioneer 10 is 63 billion trillion KM away.)
. . . . what NASA doesn't realize is that the aliens have now intercepted the probe and are using it as a coffee table. Any data returned are the result of spilled coffee, or alien equivalent thereof. :-)