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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."
/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.
>It might be an interesting experiment to turn the instruments back on and check how well they still work
Yeah, except I wonder if Pioneer can _receive_ at that distance?
They used a 70 meter dish to pick up an 8w transmission from 133 million kilometers. So, guessing that the receiver on the spacecraft isn't much larger than a meter in diameter, how much power would you have to blast into space to be heard that far away? And is it listening? And what is the round-trip delay? Sheesh, talk about serious lag!
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
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
>That data might improve its longevity and help it not turn into what Mir has become.
You wish the ISS becomes what MIR has been and still is and always will be: A space station that was built for 7 years and lasted twice that time!
It was a great piece of equipment and when it finally gets its well deserved rest, we should all apreciate the data/experience it gave us.
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.
It is transmitting something called housekeeping, or engineering, data. This is composed of things that describe the health of the spacecraft. For example, battery voltage, solar cell current, power consumption, command receiver lock and AGC, temperatures in various parts of the spacecraft. This is distinct from the science data, which includes measurements from the scientific instruments on board the spacecraft.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"Plutonium power generators have 87 year halflife, so power decreases by a factor of 2 every 87 years. So power would probably not be the limiting factor there, like in the case of Galileo for example."
actually they will not last that long. yes, radiation(and therefore available energy) will decrease by half every 87 years, but the property that determines the AVAILABLE power to the spacecraft will not really be the half-life. it will be the degredation of the thermoelectric junction by dopant migration(due to heat). galileos RTG's already produce far less then half of what they did at launch. and they are only about 10 years old.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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
The article says that it got a 16bit/s downlink from the satellite, but then later it says that all the instruments are turned off. What the hell is it transmitting then? Anyone know?
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half-crazy, falling in love with you..."
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
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