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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."
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?
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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?"...
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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 ..... ! .....
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+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
Whaddya'll say we find out what signal it's using and /. the damn thing? ;-)
...life begin at 40, or something like that?
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Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
Yeah but can you imagine how bad WAP would be if you only had 16bps!?
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
Kinda reminds me of when I had aol.
/ping pioneer
Ping reply from Pioneer : 887.28 second(s)
<NASA> damn, this lag is a bitch.
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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.
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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.
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"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."
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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