Slashdot Mirror
Pioneer 6 -- Still Alive At 35
deglr6328 writes: "As a follow up to the /. story posted on Nov.30, NASA has successfully contacted its 35-year-old Pioneer 6 spacecraft. The probe downlink (at 16bps) was tracked by the 70 Meter Goldstone Deep Space Network dish, while transmitting with total of 8 watts RF power at distance of 83 million miles (133 million Kilometers). Amazingly cool if you ask me."
Hello, this is Pionner running some-weird-unknown-governement-OS v9.201.2pre9, please login:
Login: root
Password: ******
Access denied.
Login: root
Password: ********
Access denied.
(operator shouts) Bob! I forgot the freakin' password! Or maybe did you change it?
Much easier to have a lander talk to an orbiter, which then talks back to earth.
same thing with using craft orbiting around the sun, maybe 72 degrees apart, or so, at the radius of Jupiter or similar.
It was the ball-point pen that NASA invented for space. Fountain pens don't work quite as you'd hope in a 0g environment. Pencils produce graphite dust, and potentially the lead can break and float into instruments. The graphite can conduct electricity, so it doesn't play too well to use a pencil in space.
Hmm.
Either KTB is talking to himself, or these two will be breaking bed-springs before long.
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
You forgot about all the ionizing radiation -- all those gamma rays and other hard rads from the sun..? Then there's all the cosmic radiation. Its amazing that Pioneer 6 hasn't beome as brittle as an old leaf and just fallen apart.
That said, I would LOVE to be a part of that kind of project ... designing an autonomous probe to track, close on and capture another object in solar orbit, then break solar orbit and return to near earth to be captured by the shuttle or something. It would be a very challenging design. Probably be a decent test bed for some NMD technology too.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
NASA gets a lot of bad press for say, not doing metric conversions
:p Goes to prove the old axiom, "fast, good or cheap, pick any two".. In the expensive old days NASA could afford to build stuff to last..
Well, they didn't have the time or money to double check
Your Working Boy,
Care to enlighten the rest of us?
SB.
Hell, just the three-way TCP handshake would tie it up for quite awhile... (think RTT).
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Yeah. It's too bad MTV doesn't air the rocket-crashing-on-the-launchpad "M" commercial anymore. (You know, one of the classics from the 80s.) Now I got that damn theme going though my head: Dum, Da Dum, Da dum, Da da da daDUM, Da Dum, Da dadada, Da dadadaDUM, Da Dum, Da dadada, Da dadada...
Ok, so my posts tonight aren't exactly value-added. It's Saturday, ok?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Get YOUR facts straight, bub. The 83 million mile figure applies to Pioneer 6 which is orbiting the sun and is 35 years old, not Pioneer 10 which is 28 years old and has left the Solar System .
--Joe (getting a little peeved that the side reference to Pioneer 10 in the article has thrown everyone off.)--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Umm... perhaps you should read the actual article. The probe is in solar orbit. Pioneer 10 is the one way the fsck out there, Pioneer 6 is closer to the Sun than we are. =)
Pioneer 6 has orbited the Sun since its launch
Nice for space.com to hyperlink SUN for everyone who doesn't know what it is.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
>Constant radiation effects over large (decades)
>periods of time, combined with extreme (and
>inconsistent) temperatures
Well, I've got these dishes that goes from the fridge to the microwave a lot...
-LjM
It would be nice if you could read.
Science: Pioneer 6 -- Still Alive At 35
Notice: Pioneer 6. Six. Not ten. Six.
Six.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That's the whole neat thing about the SR-71; it's NOT just a rocket. It uses jet fuel (albeit strange jet fuel) mixed with air for propulsion. Its ability to do this at mach 3+ for long periods of time is both unique and amazing.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I find the concept of a working ramjet more amazing than any standard turbojet+afterburner combination, no matter how advanced.
The reason the SR-71 has to fuel up after takeoff is because the skin expands at the high temperatures in-flight (over a thousand degrees F on the hot spots, sustained!) and to make room for that, its fuel tanks leak like crazy when it's cooled off on the ground.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
My brief research indicates that the V1 used pulse jet engines, which are related to ramjets only in that they both burn fuel to produce thrust.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
There are several types of ramjet-like engines. The one with no moving parts is called a scramjet or something like that, I've forgotten the names. The SR-71's engines have plenty of moving parts, and they're moving during all phases of flight. Just the amount of control behind the movement of the big inlet spikes alone is incredible. And, of course, the engine has to run well below mach 3, too.
Where else has a ramjet-style engine been used and gotten out of the experimental phase and into common use? I've never heard of any, not that it means anything. I'd be interested in any pointers.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Hey, umm, doesn't it take oxygen to oxidize??? "OH MY GOD, WE'VE HIT AN OXYGEN CLOUD... WERE GOING TO RUST..."
But this is an excellent display of craftmanship, there are many other factors besides oxygen that should/could/will eventually make this thing as useful as a toaster.
My question is, what did it say? I imagine it's something like "H..E....Lp...MEe. steeeeer tworads ssuuuun......"
-Aaron
----------------- Who is Jesus?
Pioneer 6 was placed in a Sun orbit at 74 million miles...it's closer to the Sun than Earth is.
Maybe you're thinking of the
Pioneer 10 which achieved solar system escape velocity and is approx 7 BILLION miles from earth
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black..heheh
..........FULL STOP.
Um... we don't need space probes to measure the effects of radiation on materials. We've been building nuclear reactors for over 60 years now, it's pretty well understood what happens.
After several decades of quiet contemplation, the 16 bit message, mysteriously enough, was 42.
good one....
It took me a bit to remember the question though!
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
Funny, yes. But note, however, that NASA didn't try to send any commands to it, they only listened. So there actually was no conversation...
I doubt, therefore I may be.
133 million km isn't even 1 AU. They must've meant 133  Tm.
Well, you can laugh all you want, but the nobelprice winners of 1998 actually ended up talking about StarTrek, when discussing which final frontier the human race had.
So I guess that your outburst just signals, that you bellong to the 80% of the less gifted here on earth.
-H
those are awesome
You know, Mir has lasted like waaaay longer than intended. Pulling that off should be something for the engineers to strive for.
You know, here in Europe, i heard a joke: For space, NASA invented a pen that could write in a 0g environment. The russians just used a pencil.
Not funny and not true. Pencils have a nasty habit of breaking and producing dust and shavings that are difficult to control in zero G and clog equipment. The way I heard it was when the need arose the Russians used the same pen the Americans had designed.
And you sir, are not.
Are you completely dense? You obviously didn't take the time to check the facts yourself.
And get yourself a spellchecker...
(BTW, you really don't need a reason to do an anti-Katz rant.)
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
This is really just a publicity thing. NASA is pumping up its successes to keep the funding flowing for the ISS.
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Sure, the question is "what's 6 x 7?"...
That's not what the scrabble set says!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Or... send probes out in the manner you described toward outer solar systems, powered by ion drives... what's that, a 30 year mission to observe other stars and their planets? Maybe?
Ummm if you do any research at all about Voyager 1 and 2, you'll see that they were NOT sent on the same mission.
Using the same directional antenna with the same power, to the same antenna on the other end should reproduct a signal of approximately the same signal strength.
Rod Taylor
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
Actually, the answer is to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
jedrek
-- polish ccs mirror
You're thinking of the older Pioneer 10 and 11 craft that are leaving the solar system. Pioneer 6 is actually not that far away. (0.8 AUs from the sun, whereas we are 1.0 AUs away...)
"What's yellow and dangerous?"
"No, no good, it doesn't fit the answer."
"All right, What do you get if you multiply six by seven?"
"No, no, too literal, too factual, wouldn't sustain the punters' interest."
"Here's a thought. How many roads must a man walk down?"
"Ah! Aha, now that does sound promising! Yes, that's excellent! Sounds very significant without actually meaning anything at all. How many roads must a man walk down? Forty-two. Excellent, excellent, that'll fox 'em. Frankie, baby, we are made!"
--excerpted(with pieces removed) from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
# ping pioneer6.nasa.gov
PING pioneer6.nasa.gov from earth.nasa.gov : 56 (84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=0 ttl=30 time=376667 ms
64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=1 ttl=30 time=377687 ms
64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=2 ttl=30 time=379852 ms
64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=3 ttl=30 time=376745 ms
--- pioneer6.nasa.gov ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 376667/377737.6/379852 ms
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
In 35 years? Does anyone know what kind of path they sent this thing on? I mean, that's less than the distance from my chair that I'm sitting in to the Sun, which is some 92 million miles. Cassini I think has gone further than that, as has all Voyager probes and Pioneeer 10, which last I heard was in the cloud beyond our solar system. Maybe they should tell it to speed up
I'm much more impressed by the Concorde. Cruises at Mach 2 only(!), but while carrying 100 passsengers. People who know, say that its engines are the most complicated piece of engineering in the world. Plus, it is really amazing that it actually performs decently aerodynamics-wise at both sub and supersonic speeds. The SR-71 is *horrible* until it reaches cruising altitude and speed. It actually has to take off and then fuel up in the air!
Sounds like my mom.
its fuel tanks leak like crazy when it's cooled off on the ground.
:-) Anyway, ramjets have been used for other applications too (missiles), so they are not unique to the SR-71. Besides, a ramjet is the simplest possible engine, because it has no moving parts: just an inlet and a combustion chamber. A turbofan is much more complicated, because it has a ridiculous number of precisely engineered fanblades, gear assembly, a compressor, etc.
Hence the jelo fuel, so that it leaks less.
Both ramjets and scramjets have no moving parts. The difference is that in ramjets the inflow is decelerated to subsonic speeds. However at some high Mach number the pressure loss due to deceleration becomes too high and the combustion product (water) might actually ionize due to intense heating. In that case, scramjets become feasible, where the flow remains supersonic during combustion (SCRAMjet == Supersonic Combustion ramjet). There are meny problems with scramjets which have yet to be researched (like the need to mix the fuel with the intake air REALLY quickly).
The SR-71 engine does have moving parts because it is a mix between a turbojet and a ramjet. It operates as a regular turbojet at low speeds.
Ramjets have been used in Surface-Air and Air-Surface missiles (eg. C-101, C-301.)
Keep in mind that Pioneer is being kept cryogenically cooled at 3.2K in a hard vacuum and far away from most sources of ionizing radiation. It's not exactly hard to keep tech operating in those kinds of optimal conditions.
Not quite. Pioneer 6 orbits at about the same distance from the Sun as Earth and so half of it is always exposed to the Sun getting 1360 Watts/sq.meter of solar power. However, it is covered with solar arrays, so the inside is in shadow. Solar arrays, have at most 15% efficiency (probably a lot less after 35 years of operation), the rest is thermal power which heats up the spacecraft and has to be dissipated. There can be some very intense temperature differences in different parts of the craft. In fact cooling is often a big problem because there are no convective air currents. CCD cameras are such a problem in newer spacecrafts, because they have a very small operating temperature range (20 Celsius being optimal).
Also, the rotation of the craft means that different parts are exposed to the Sun constantly and thermal expansion and contraction also results in fatigue of the materials.
In addition, there are a lot of high-enegy particles hitting the craft constantly, since there is no atmosphere to protect it.
About the SR-71: It is a great craft, but I wouldn't say it symbolizes the pinnacle of technological progress. It's just a rocket with small wings, made from titanium, using jelo as fuel.
That's damn cool. My computer's power button hasn't even been able to contact the rest of the damn machine and it's not 83 anything away! Stupid damn machine.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Wasn't this the spacecraft with over 20 thousand bad transistors? What a remarkable accomplishment if this was true. Either way it's amazing! ;)
Greets to #coders!
damnit wheres the undo button on this thing (j/k)Ok...after rereading it and feeling the heat... I f$#^ed up... humble apologies
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
Physics major, are we? ;-)
That is absolutely amazing. I guess the Star Trek idea won't happen. :(
--Dark|||Knight
I think that if they were trying to transmit to the probe, they'd pump out something more like 8,000,000 watts from the dish..
Never mind , I thought this was a story about pioneer 10! My bad
I guess I thought it was much longer than that. I was thinking it took hours for it to reach Jupiter and the probe was much much farther than that now.
I don't know what I was thinking.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
(nevermind)
NASA didn't spend any time or energy developing a "space pen." They used pencils in the beginning too until Fisher (which still sells them) volunteered to develop a pressurized pen for free. Ever since, Cosmonauts have used those pens as well, by the way.
So they can get a signal at a flux of 5.7 x 10^-21 W/m^2. I'm impressed. Even on a 70m telescope this is 3.5 x 10^-16 Watts, which is the a signal to thermal noise at 20C of 0.025
Frankly that's amazing.
> And what is the round-trip delay?
The round trip delay is 443 sec, or about 7 minutes. Not that bad, is it?
My other sig is also a
Wow, our radio telescope never ceases to amaze me. Yes, I said ours, as in my school's. One room is "Mission Control" were we can command the radio telescope out at Goldstone!
I would say that is more creepy that funny. Remember, NASA made Pioneer, so that would mean they made their mother. Ewwww....
Why does this old tech last so long, while later gee whizz probes plummet into Mars? Lots of the early probes failed, IIRC, it's just that nobody remembers the early failures. Incidentally, the Russians probably had a lot more, including manned ones.
There's a big difference between sticking a box of scientific instruments in orbit of the sun and landing them on another planet. Yeah, there were plenty of failures, but that was in the beginning. Then they learned all the intricacies of getting rockets and payloads into orbit and navigating the solar system, and those projects afterwards (Voyager, Galileo, Pioneer) were very successful.
Now, we're only at the beginning of the sending stuff to other planets phase. NASA is still learning how to make good reliable landings, but once they do, it'll make way for further exploration, manned missions, etc... As far as I know, the only way NASA has gotten stuff from space back to earth was from 1) smacking it into the ocean in an oblong capsule or 2) landing the space shuttle on a controlled surface (runway) with a crew guiding it. You can't do that on Mars. (And the X-* vehicles, but those were all suborbital, and aren't ready yet.) If you imagine if they landed a gemini capsule in some random uncontrolled enviroment on earth, vertically, using a controlled descent. This stuff is MASSIVELY hard! Or, as NASA would say, non-trivial. We've done some stuff right, but there's still some experience to be gained until it's at the level of, say, the Pioneer 6 engineering quality.
Just my opinion, Josh
I just found a new sig.
Unfortunately, you'd need to boost the optical signal fairly often - every few hundres kms or so, depending on how fast the data transmission is.
;-)
(And then, what if the Klingons go and slice though the line? No more link...
Which results in my favorite line:
"I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Damm it!!, I would prefer Fortran 80 instead. We were lucky Java (and Java beans) wans't invented at that time.
--ricardo
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
Maybe nasa should of held conferences for dot coms before they couldn't afford them. I'm just waiting for some dot-com ceo whose valuation was in the billions of dollars to go butt monkey whacko and take out a bunch of people.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
jeb.
so wouldn't that make the /. effect, the SlashDoS effect?- ----------------------
----------------------------------------
------
"And may your days be long upon the earth."
actually, thats what they do on Star Trek... they have a series of relay stations that carify and boost signals and route them to correct places :) 1/4 km long routers :P
------
http://vinnland.2y.net/
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
They dont't build them like they used to. This remindes me of the Space Ice cream my friend had in the deep freeze for 10 years and was still good.
No No it was running a *BSD. Those boxs have this kind of uptime.
Why does this old tech last so long, while later gee whizz probes plummet into Mars?
Because in those days NASA had a massive budget. They could afford to build, big, expensive projects that would never get past design stage today. In fact, often two probes were launched for a single mission. Today, NASA's new budget is considerably smaller as a percentage of GNP. New probes are built a lot cheaper! Without the Russians, it's hard for people to get excited about space....
I would say that it is because modern probes incorporate complex technology.
Think again. You NEED complex technology just to get into space. In Pioneer 6's case, a fair bit of nuclear engineering went into the design of the power systems alone.
Modern probes crash and burn because of software bugs or an inability to convert units.
Wrong again! First of all, modern probes are usually designed with a lower life expectancy. For example, the recent Mars lander was able to land on the planet with only a parachute-type system instead of retro rockets. New probes are built a lot cheaper! Secondly, an mistake with units is NOT a mechanical flaw, it is a mathematical mistake!
You seem to be confusing NASA operations with the software business, where simplicity and in-house design are valuable. I've been both a programmer and an electrical engineer, and let me tell you, it ain't the same!
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
I wonder who wins? (And btw... if I have friends with me, you probably won't even get near me before it's over.)
Tasers are just police weapons like pepper spray. They're not meant for combat you dumb shit.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
I installed a Goldstone DS Network Dish (facing south of course) outside my home once. For the life of me, I couldn't understand why all I got was one channel with the same show - a whole lot of blackness and the occasional white dots. Now I know!
---
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
Shit man, trilene 50lb test'd do just fine. Reel that sucker in when yer ready!!! Won't fight much in Zero G.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
need help with this .i..
Loading linux is like tugging a boulder up the side of a small mountain.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
In the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy"
It is the awnser to "Life, The Universe, and Everything?"
..and Pioneer 10's ping time would be more than 10 1/2 hours. Wow! Talk about lag.
I think the ability of a satellite that old and that far away demonstrates that NASA has (or at least had) some good abilities, despite the failures that they have had in the past. Even though there have been some catastrophic failures, there have been far more successes as well as many new technologies that have come out of the space program.
to tell Pioneer 6 that John Lennon is dead 20 years ago.
Yet they can hear this thing loud and clear from 83 million miles away. heheh..
-
this is a big deal because of the sheer age of the spacecraft. It's older than most of the readers of /. and still transmitting away..considering the thing was built to last a few years at most.. so much for that MTBF :)
-
outside commercial companies have always built the stuff. Boeing, TRW, lockheed, pratt & whitney.. my father worked on the design of space shuttle turbopumps at P&W way back in the day. Though the govt provided security for such companies :)
-
It's still working after 35 years? Now, if they could do that with the stuff we're sending up now...
Whoa!-- You mean you know what the question is? No sense in carrying on this Earth experiment then. I'll meet you guys back at the dinner.
I am Jack's HTTP Server
Mein troll, why must you keep trolling? You ARE smart.
"If I were NASA, I would call for a 'back-to-basics' approach to probe design. I would ban the all software but the most basic.
I would demand that all design work and construction take place in house, following the Russian 'socialist' model. Outside contracting
to commercial companies does not work; they just cut corners and introduce mistakes.
The only way forward for NASA is backwards, so to speak."
There is no need for des/const in house anymore. We have companies that can do this better than the "house" (gov) can. What we do need is to get the hell out of the CheaperFaster model that Nasa adopted, and quintuple-test every circuit as was done in times of yore.
Goat sex free since 2001
This just shows, that if you don't have a lot going for you (8 watts), size does matter.
I think there are plenty of reasons to send humans into space. Do you think one can make a robot for anything that a human can do? I can assure you, it would be far more costly to even attempt that instead of sending a human.
Humans are extremely versatile at interpreting data and making decisions based on their interpretations. You can not program a machine to do something that you don't know what's going to be.
And about ISS: yes, it is really useful to science. If not now, it has the potential to be useful to science in ways nothing else can match. Reasons? just look around at all the knowledge acumulated by _human_ space flights until now. You really think everything they can do is done, and we can send machines instead?
Or maybe this is just a troll...
For one thing, there's probably not much we could learn from the Pi6 instruments that we can't find out easier elsewhere. Now that we know the nature of solar weather a lot better than we did in the 1960's, we can rely on instruments in Earth orbit and even groundside which do not tie up huge radio telescopes and return more data.
For another, power consumption is always a concern even on solar-powered craft. Operating instruments drop the bus voltage, which makes the other instruments less reliable; turning stuff off makes the stuff that stays on work better. It's also possible for an instrument to fail and short its power bus, which can kill the whole craft unless there is a backup system (and a lot of early probes weren't that overbuilt). Pi6's main contribution to science now is just what we got from it, the "damn, it's still working?" report.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
It is very doubtful that these early probes used anything more sophisiticated than parity bits and simple checksums. The computers they were able to fly back then were very stupid. I don't even think Pioneer had the ability to upload and run new code. If you note the pictures, you will notice it doesn't even have a dish -- just an axial dipole antenna. It is closer to a weather beacon in concept than more modern probes like Voyager with their reprogrammable, reconfigurable robotic platforms.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
This really shows what you can do when you don't have the availability to patch your product. I think many software manufactures could learn from this and them.
Gur nyvra va Fgneg Gerx jnf IBLNTRE 6 abg CVBARRE 6
---
---
This post has been rot13'd for your protection
Geeze! what kind of nitwit are you?
Lots of the early probes failed, IIRC, it's just that nobody remembers the early failures. Incidentally, the Russians probably had a lot more, including manned ones.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
> Which alloys, compounds, solders, construction methods, etc. hold up best in space.
:)
Sure, all they need to do is go out there and grab it so they can look at the physical damage. You volunteering?
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
in base 13
The disk drive in your computer was probably designed to last a certain length of time, say 5 years. When you see MTBF numbers on spec sheets, they are usually only valid for the design lifetime.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Care to enlighten the rest of us?
Sure, the question is "what's 6 x 7?"...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I'm curious, If they want to keep contact with it, why don't they just send out a 'relay' probe behind it? Have the relay pick up the signal, and amp it and send it back to earth...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
H ..... e ..... l ..... l ..... o ..... W ..... o ..... r ..... l ..... d ..... ! ..... H ..... e ..... l ..... l ..... o ..... W ..... o ..... r ..... l ..... d ..... ! .....
--
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
MEEPT!!!!! would like to agree completely with the above post. It is indeed nothing short of genius. MEEPT!!!!! has spent many hours squishing avocado between his/her/its toes while pondering the nature of NASA's flaws, and has come to the same conclusion. A computer can suffer from any number of flaws, while a good hand crafted abacus has very few problems, because it can be easily debugged by hand. MEEPT!!!!! humbly suggests that the space program get back to basics, and hire those crafty Chinese to craft the Official NASA Abacus.
This MEEPT!!!! has been brought to you by the letters A, X, ll and the number 8.
MEEPT!!!!!
You always hear NASA saying a probe they are sending somewhere is designed to work for only a month or six or something like that and then the probe goes on working for years even decades longer. Are they purposefully saying a space probe has a short life just so they can look good when it last longer? Or do they build these things better than they knew?
Pioneer 6, I believe, is solar powered. I'm not sure really how long a nuclear battery will last on something like Voyager but if a probe has regular power from the sun, and is harden against radiation and temperature changes in space could it not last centuries?
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
I think you mean Voyager 6...not Pioneer 6.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Kind of like printing a test page...I would imagine
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
The dope.
www.matthewmiller.net
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Yep. Did you also know that metal knives didn't replace flint knives until Roman times? While available for a few thousand years before then, it just wasn't possible to get a metal knife to keep an edge as well as flint until around the time of Rome's rise to power.
Plus, a knife does more damage and doesn't have that pesky battery problem like a tazer.
Stone knives don't care if an EMP hits you, or if a giant magnet is trying to extract all your weapons. Flint knives often have a sharper edge than many of the low to mid-range weapons sold today, and they're made of materials that require less energy and infrastructure to extract and shape. It's a lot easier to spend an hour making a new stone knife than it is to mine ore, refine the metal, shape it and sharpen it....
AND they don't rust!
www.matthewmiller.net, the web site that doesn't rust
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
...life begin at 40, or something like that?
---
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
that Pioneer6 is a posterboy for spacecraft durability of the 60's, while todays probes are plagued with fatal problems. This is not the case.
In fact the reason two identical spacecraft were sent on the same mission so often (voyager 1&2, and the many Pioneer probes for instance)was precisely because they were so prone to failure and malfunction(not to mention exploding on the launch pad), that it was economical to ASSUME one of the probes would fail and send two as a redundancy.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
And I thought my modem was slow. Can't imagine waiting to download a web page on that link :)
Not quite... I read the government report on the incident a couple of years ago, and the engineers were quite adamant all the way through that launching was a bad idea, but since the air temperature in the immediate vicinity of the boosters (about 26 degrees F) was right on the edge of the theoretical envelope (a fact hesitently aknowledged by the engineers), MT managers passed the go-ahead on to NASA. The operations managers were apparently under severe pressure from the senior management to launch for financial reasons, and so, in fear of their jobs and possibly still in the OK zone, they called it in.
Several MT engineers resigned in protest after the explosion, and I've heard rumors that at least one person (not sure if it was a manager or an engineer) committed suicide over it.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Right - and the story clearly says "Pioneer 6". Pioneer 10 is over 3 billion miles outside the solar system, while Pioneer 6 is orbiting the Sun and was meant to study solar wind, cosmic rays and the Sun's magnetic field.
Number the letters of the alphabet sequentially from 1 to 26, then spell out "Love" and "War", adding the value of each letter together.
Interesting?!?
bah, I'm bored.. :P
Oct 1 of 1997 was a Wednesday
12418 days is roughly 34 years (freq drift on the internal clock? heh)
erm
the only obvious thing is that Linux came out in 1992.. but you knew that
How old is Linus? Was he even alive 34 years ago? hehe
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
It might be an interesting experiment to turn the instruments back on and check how well they still work to help the engineers building the space station. That data might improve its longevity and help it not turn into what Mir has become.
I need a funny sig
On space station Earth, with an atmosphere polluted by CO, NO2 and NO3, acid rains and other noxious compounds in our air, water, soil, and bodies...
I'd imagine a satellite space station would potentially have a much cleaner, if not better, environment ^^
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
It really does depend on the skill of the combatants, I think, and not the crudeness or technical accomplishment of the weapon.
.45 magnum has tremendous amount of kickback, such that if the first shot is missed, the guy with the stone knife(essentially equivilent to a combat knife) almost certainly has the advantage.
For the poorly trained, I think the
On the other hand, a stone knife in the hands of a inept klutz has only chance on his side ^^
Then there's the fact that a magnum has only 6 or so shots, right?
So it's still not conclusive ^^
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
So, it should looks like this :
PING Pioneer_6 (198.116.142.34): 16 data bytes
16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=0 time=443641 ms
16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=1 time=440580 ms
16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=2 time=448851 ms
16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=3 time=446892 ms
16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=4 time=442157 ms
^C
----Pioneer_6 PING Statistics----
5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 440580/444424/448851
/ping pioneer
Ping reply from Pioneer : 887.28 second(s)
<NASA> damn, this lag is a bitch.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
I got Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 6 mixed up. Pioneer 10 is at 3.2K, Pioneer 6 is in solar orbit.
Re: the SR-71. I didn't use it to represent the pinnacle of technical progress; by today's standards, it's interesting but not fascinating. Same can be said about the Bell X-1. But by the standards of the day, both were absolutely stunning--and neither could have, would have, been designed if it'd been done in-house.
Silly, the craft is 15 years old. They'd be running a nice, solid AT&T unix. But with a 16bps maximum bitrate, it only takes 2 people to slashdot the probe.
:-)
And if you know how, here's how its done:
pioneer_control$ ping -w 4000000 -c 2 -s 2 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol
10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=0 ttl=253 time=1437912.385 ms
10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=1 ttl=253 time=1044077.385 ms
pioneer_control$ traceroute -w 4000000 -q 1 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol 16
traceroute to six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6), 30 hops max, 16 byte packets
16 204.6.124.194 (204.6.124.194) 139.096 ms
17 154.13.2.47 (154.13.2.47) 161.395 ms
18 38.1.25.230 (38.1.25.230) 124.904 ms
19 204.6.150.17 (204.6.150.17) 133.634 ms
20 jpl-gateway.nasa.gov (38.144.103.114) 235.643 ms
21 orbital-gw.jpl.nasa.gov (38.201.67.7) 127.282 ms
22 goldstone-gw.jpl.nasa.orb (98.10.1.31) 2033.643 ms
23 heliotrope-orbit-gw-16bps.jpl.nasa.orb (98.11.244.254) 2391.654 ms
24 antenna-70.jpl.nasa.orb.sol (98.144.2.1) 2169.122 ms
25 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6) 1822431.987 ms
You've just got to stop using those terrestrial based name servers run by the evil ICANN
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
NASA gets a lot of bad press for say, not doing metric conversions, but this clearly is an example of excellent professionals doing their best. A lot of solder joints will oxidize and go bad before thirty five years.. this goes to show that the NASA engineers were not considering how long the probe was wanted when they built it, but rather built it for its maximum life. If only VCRs and such were built like that: today's consumer electronics have a bunch of cheap, light plastic parts :(
-bugg
Not quite... it depends on your interpretation of the story. The closest HHGTTG actually comes to revealing the question is when Ford and Arthur start experimenting with the scrabble board towards the end of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Here it is revealed that the Golgafrincham have come to prehistoric Earth and are killing off the original populance - the members of Deep Thoughts experiment. They further reason that since Marvin mentioned that Arthur had the question printed in his brain wave patterns, that he may have a bastarised version. This is where scrabble comes in.
In the end the (damaged) question is revealed by the scrabble pieces as follows:
W, H, A, T, D, O, Y, O, U, G, E, T, I, F, Y, O, U, M, U, L, T, I, P, L, Y, S, I, X, B, Y, N, I, N, E
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Think of it as a system wide internet =]
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Is that 16bps before or after error correction/detection codes? I just remember reading about some of the error correction codes the later Pioneer probes used, and wondered how advanced the codes used on Pioneer 6 were.
Pi'neer returns to destroy an earth made bland by balding men and unisex uniforms, plodding along aimlessly.
NASA has known the answer to this since the end of the cold war... FUNDING
In an unrelated news, NASA said they launched a new web site dedicated to the history of a series of their Pioneer probes. It can be reached at http://www.pioneer6.orbit.sun.space.com.
However, the site seemed to be down during the first several hours after it's launch. We contacted one of the NASA representatives, this is what he told our reporter:
"That site doesn't have enough bandwidth to handle thousands of requests from people all around the world. We also had to ban visitors that came from a popular discussion site Slashdot - there were just too many of them".
To the question if NASA is planning on enhancing the communication channel, we were told that this is impossible at this time.
Some people who were able to get through to the site, told us that it was very slow, download speed did not exceed 16bps. "You should not put banners on top of that page - it's slowing my browser to a halt", one angry web surfer said in an email to NASA.
--
--
On scale from -14 to 56 this post is '-15, Nonexistent'
since they have successfully built a long-lasting probe:
Effects of long term space radiation exposure on instruments, circuitry of all types. They have years of data now and can figure out exactly how the radiation affects performance.
Which alloys, compounds, solders, construction methods, etc. hold up best in space.
In space construction what really is the limiting factor. What burns out first?
Goat sex free since 2001
The new-era NASA doesn't have that luxury. The new plan is to make a lot of (relatively-speaking) cheap stuff and send it up with fingers crossed. Even if half of it fails, it's *still* a bargain.
--
"Hello, Pioneer? This is NASA."
"NASA? My NASA? It couldn't be my NASA because you never call."
"Listen, I--"
"Are you eating right? You're not eating right, are you? Don't make that face, young man. I can tell."
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I would ban all software but the most basic...
... I would demand that all design work and construction take place in house
They already do this. Have you ever seen avionics software? Much of it is written in Ada or its subsets, with intensive review and oftentimes provably-correct methodology, such as the Ada83 subset SPARK. (Note that provably-correct software is only provable to do what you tell it to do; it's not provably what you want done.)
Why does this old tech last so long
It doesn't. The Smithsonian and other museums are having a hell of a time with the Apollo spacesuits, because they're beginning to crumble away into nothingness.
Keep in mind that Pioneer is being kept cryogenically cooled at 3.2K in a hard vacuum and far away from most sources of ionizing radiation. It's not exactly hard to keep tech operating in those kinds of optimal conditions.
If I were NASA
That's why you're not NASA, and why I never, ever want to get my ass launched into orbit by a NASA-designed, NASA-constructed spacecraft. If you think NASA has all the brainpower, you're dead wrong. When it comes to avionics, the brainpower is in Boeing, Martin-Marietta, General Dynamics, Lockheed and other places in the same vein.
Who designed the SR-21 Blackbird, one of the greatest aviation feats of all time? Free hint: it wasn't the government.
Who designed the X-1, the first plane to fly faster than sound? It wasn't the government.
If you're going to construct everything in-house, you're going to need a chip fab plant to build your own computer hardware. Never mind that we've got exhaustively-tested, radiation-hardened 386SX chips... we have to throw out the 386SX, even though it's a fine, well-proven chip, simply because it was designed by Intel, not "in house".
You have to throw away the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, even though they're masterpieces of engineering--one failure in the entire operational life of the Shuttle fleet, and Morton-Thiokol engineers warned NASA that launching in cold conditions would cause the failure. By every measurable standard, the Morton-Thiokol SRBs are fine and reliable pieces of engineering, when used within their specified tolerances (which are, BTW, pretty damn generous). Why? Because it wasn't designed or built in-house.
Outside contracting to commercial companies does not work; they just cut corners and introduce mistakes.
The SR-71 disagrees with you. As do the Shuttle's main engines. As do the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters. As do the United States' impressive array of spy satellites, the majority of which were constructed by TRW.
Are you sure you still want to assert that outside contracting results in poor engineering and shoddy workmanship?
After several decades of quiet contemplation, the 16 bit message, mysteriously enough, was 42.
Back in my day, we built probes that would last decades. Forget this disposable, one-use crap you kids go in for now. When we launched something, even if it was designed for a six month mission, we EXPECTED it to last until our grandkids were running things, so they could look up and know that we were better at building this stuff than they could ever hope to be.
And we used a slide rule for everything! That little chunk of plastic and metal you use to play games has more computing power than all of NASA had when Pioneer 6 was launched!
Brusing up on using a slide rule: www.matthewmiller.net
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
After bouncing the signal off a few moons in the outer part of our solar system, NASA scientists identified the Pioneer Spacecraft easily when they logged in - login: nasa password: Linux 0.0.1test1 Last login: Fri Oct 1 12:42:57 +0500 1997 from nasa.gov You have mail. nasa@pioneer:~$uptime 6:30pm up 12418 days, 12:41, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.01