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NASA Contacts Pioneer 10
Spaceboy writes: "NASA scientists said Sunday they have contacted the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, ending fears that the robotic probe had gone silent 29 years into a mission that has carried it more than 7 billion miles from Earth. Here's the story at excite.com." NASA still maintains a Pioneer webpage, which has been updated with recent information.
so you dont think that nasa's call for low cost and short development time (ie less than 3 years) on missions has anything to do with it?
So Pioneer bears a plaque with a message of good will. Launched from the country who's economy depends on war, and with the highest prison population. Not that the rest of the world is much better. "Sure aliens, come on down, it'll be good times for all."
Maybe that's the problem with the probes....The programmers are programming them in bash
Wouldn't the time inbetween those pings increace arithmatically, because afterall, there is a 20 hour time delta....Not to be Anal, or anything, of course... *grin*
Whether a project team is centralized or distributed, whether the code is proprietary or open, make little difference. Terabytes of crappy software has been spewing out of proprietary teams for over half a century; why should open projects be any different?
It's easy to look at the hundreds of crappy open source projects and deduce that open source software sucks in general, but they're *visible*. You don't see the bad code in proprietary software, you just swear at Bill Gates and reboot.
The open projects that really have it together are an order of magnitude better organized, managed, documented and tested than most proprietary software.
no, a port scan would take about 21 hours and some minutes to complete...
:)
portscanning is not pinging -- you can do it in paralel
err, a better analogy used in most chemistry books lately is the dart analogy.
A guy throws 10 darts that all hit nearly the same spot about an inch from the edge of the target. That's precision.
A guy throws 10 darts that all hit in a randomly distributed area around the bullseye. That's accuracy.
A guy throws 10 darts and they all hit the exact middle of the board. Now you lost the bet.
implying that they are not software companies, thus my entire argument does not apply! *ank*, thanks for playing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Stupid question...
What is a DC-DC converter? Why would one need to convert DC power to DC power? Stepping it to a different voltage, or something?
(Clearly, yes, I *am* almost entirely ignorant of electrical engineering, thank you.)
Isn't this old news? I remember seeing this quite a while ago in some newspapers and tech journals. Or is this a different event?
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Seems to me that since they will lose the signal
not to far in the future, it would make more
sense to turn it around and bring it back to
earth orbit if they have the fuel. They should
be able to learn something about the long term
effects of exposure to space from it.
hahah, touché I second that idea! And while we're at it, we can install a bunch of webcams to see their stunned reactions. at finding a desolate planet.
not for just 4 pings, they are sent out every second. If it waited for a reply before sending the next then yes, but thats not the way it works :)
more like
"request timed out"
I ate my sig.
but it has fixed itself, certainly not something you can claim about Windows.
;)
Hey, windows fixes itself.. it just needs a reboot. Problem is that it fixes itself too often, like always
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Of course Pioneer should have a map on it. How else are we going to get our 'ball' back when it lands in our neighbours garden? Lets just hope they have better map reading skills than some people I know, or there will be a bunch of really disappointed aliens turning up on the third planet of some other star.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
When I happen to remember Pioneer, between beers at my usual party, I do toast it, and hope that I'll live as long as that probe! :-) guess I better cut back on the beers ;-)
It's still going to be pretty faint though.
Remember, it's 8w from a "point source" as opposed to something the size of a deep sky object.
Well I doubt it will, but I would hope that this would inspire the current breed and future enginners to once again stirve to build the bad ass probes of old. While I'm no engineer I always appreciate machines and things that are build to last. Be it old cars that still run fine today, to die cast toys which are still in good condiation 20 years later, while the plastic ones break in only 2 years or so.
Stated differently: Free software that is distrubuted under a policy of Release Early, Release Often is generally trash.
Cunning linguists
5W NBFM transmitter, 146MHz (amateur 2m band)
Theoric distance of over 10,000 miles (in free space).
Oh My God, I think I'm going to wet myself laughing.
All your base belong to ---===*> XO
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Ironically, I had an interview today for a training course specifically aimed towards IBM Mainframe Operating with OS/390. One of those ironies eh?
Why would you want to? More carcasses to strip and integrate into The Project. Mine's a security bot with integrated flashbulb tazer, betamax VCR capability and Data-Over-CB networking. ;)
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yeah, but what is the Loonies' brain cancer rate?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I don't see how this is flamebait either... He brought a valid point and merely questioned the significance of the story... don't mod down just because this guy doesn't share your particular opinion.
Think thats cool... Try this on.
/trillionth/ of the energy of a snowflake hitting the ground.
The actual amount of energy hititng the dishes used to listen for the signal is quite small.
About one
Tequila - drink of the gods.
Hmmm. Wonder what would be involved with contacting pioneer via RFC1149?
...
At least the launch vehicles would be small. Only problem is how do you put a space suit on a pigeon?
*Squaaaawk!*
No, thats not it....
*Squaaaaaaaaaaaaawk!*
Garn!
*Squaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawk!* *crunch*
Oopsy.
Tequila - drink of the gods.
... if this thing is powered by IBM's self-policing and self-healing computer server. :) I can't even beleive that NASA was still monitoring signals for the pioneer to reply, you think they would've stopped after that long.
Mars probes have indeed been FBC- in fact they were the impetus. But over NASA's history the failure rate of unmanned missions HAS NOT CHANGED. See Ranger, Viking, whatever. The causes of failure have shifted, as old problems have been dealt with but missions have grown more complex. But the idea behind FBC was that if you're going to have one failure in three, you're better off doing lots of smaller missions...
DSN: Deep Space Network [of dishes] Many groups (SETI, etc.) are studying how to pull data out of noisy radio streams, these deep probes provide a good needle in the haystack, if you will.
hmm... so is that why floppy disks suck now days?
yeah, it's off topic, but it BUGS me
well one thing to keep in mind is that it already happens to be out there. I mean think about how long it would take to get a probe out that far. Since it's, there it might as well snoop around. It's also hard for NASA to justify sending an expensive probe out to study interstellar space way out there.
Question: so what will the new billion dollar probe study? Planets, asteroids, the moon?
Nasa: No, it's going to study the vacuum of space... maybe a few dust particles here and there, that sort of thing. It should take a few decades before we know if it worked or not.
they should be bombarded with our crappy TV programming & radio transimissions, LONG before the probe hits them. I think that would probably be enough to make them mad before the probe hits them. Think in the scope of things, one alien's house being damaged is insignificant to the entire society being forced to watch Pentium 4 commercials.
But is it really worth throwing up all these probes that fail, even if they are cheaper? What do they accomplish? If you are gonna do it, get it done the first time. So what if it costs 20 times more. It has been going for alot longer period of time, and has traveled much further than any other attempts.
-------------
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Andy Tomaka
Your receiver is not sensitive/tuned enough to detect it...8 watts is fairly heafty, actually. Let it be known that I would not like an 8W microwave pointed at my head.
Stupid question...
What is a DC-DC converter? Why would one need to convert DC power to DC power? Stepping it to a different voltage, or something?
Yes, DC-DC converters are used to convert DC power to a different voltage (or polarity). One place you see them is on computer motherboards, where you have (for example) 3.3V available but you need 1.8V to power your CPU. A DC-DC converter can step the voltage down without wasting much of the power (as you would if you used a linear voltage regulator, or a resistor). DC-DC converters can also step voltages up, for example when you need to generate 300V for a camera flash from a 1.5V battery.
Space probes are not cars. A probe that costs four times as much and lasts twice as long may be worth it. A car that costs four times as much and lasts twice as long is not a car that I will be purchasing.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"HAL, copy music!"
"I'm sorry, Dave, you know I cannot copy music that the RIAA doesn't say you own."
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
uhh, have you ever worked for a software company? Have you ever looked at their code? In all the companies I've worked in they have had coding standards. You submit code to be reviewed that isn't up to the coding standard (that means, is not clear enough, does not have sensible comment blocks, does not do what it is supposed to do, does not have the proper asserts and safety checks in it, etc) and your code gets rejected. You have to fix the shit before you submit.
Well in all companies I've worked at - Fortune 500 ones - the inhouse software *is* crap and poorly written. They do nothing like what you say above. Standards are usually left to the particular programmer, if they have any, and thus most programs have many "standards" in them.
Well, its not like the microwave background, residual background noise from the big bang, which was x-ray's and gamma rays but has red shifted into the microwave band over the past what 16-17 billion years? But it is a substancial ammount of shifting when you take into account that it is a human trasmission. Its nothing huge, like solar masses moving away from us that are halfway accross the galaxy, but it is enough to basically garbal the transmission. But its fixable. So, I guess I should say, "Red shifted enough to be annoying," When it becomes untranslatable, then we'll talk about "beyond belief." ;-)
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
The premise is that on one had they can build spacecraft cheap (relatively), and have much or most of them not work. Or spend vast amounts of money checking and rechecking everything, and desining in tons of reliability, then they'd still only reach the reliability of the launch vehicle itself, so they'd still lose 1 in 20 or so.
Their studies had concluded that to get the most amount of science done for a given amount of money spent, they should expect to lose about 1 in 5 spacecraft. Pretty close to what has actually happened.
All your...
Ahhhh... forget it
Enough already with the AYB
Now don't go sending any LADA's into space ya hear?
You know, the usual health monitors .... Fan 1 and two RPM indicators, CPU and case temperature, plus voltage indicators.
How can you defend this?
"Slashdotters, engage in some honest self-assessment before you dispute this. Can you code, or should you maybe keep your mouth shut about this?"
I can code.
"And just how much of a typical linux distro can you defend as useful?"
For me? About 500 megs of Debian. The rest I don't install.
"Linux today is turning rapidly into what windows was four or five years ago."
Support? Any at all? How do you justify this?
"Windows, in case you haven't looked in the last four or five years (and those still claiming it crashes all the time obviously haven't), is getting better."
I am sometimes forced to use Windows for some things and it still disgusts me. It is wasteful, unstable, slow, unconfigurable, and incompatible.
control: pioneer 10 come in
pioneer: control, this is pioneer 10
control: young man where have you been?
pioneer: um... I was just out with some friends honest
control: young man if it weren't for your being 7 billion miles away I'd ground you.
-
(It's very late - I wasn't expecting the /. effect right now...does /. have server log data pubished anywhere? I'd love to see the time summaries...)
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I have this SF story arc floating around in my head -- two hundred years from now we figure out how to send things faster than light. So we send a probe to a nearby planet, turn around, and wait for the transmissions to start to show up from ten years in the future...
Cheers to NASA, though. May Pioneer continue.
/Brian
Okay, how's this...
I worked on a project a year and a half ago (VB development -- I was slumming) where a lot of the back-end code was in Cobol (didn't have to deal with that myself) and had no coding standards to speak of. Even better, the VB code I was dealing with was cookie-cutter code based on the work of someone else who seemed to have a pathological fear of writing comments.
Didn't help me with my VB much, and it's something of a joke to say I know anything about programming the AS/400 -- I got more information on the system by playing with the generic GUI front end than I did writing the code that talked to the database directly.
/Brian
There is significant difference in engineering a device to fly through deep space, and a device you wish to continue to function AFTER it has been thrown at a planet's surface... How many G's has Pioneer been subjected to since it was launched?
Exsqueeze me? According to the Excite article, Pioneer 10 is travelling at 27,380 miles per hour relative to the sun. According to my calculations, this is about 0.00004 c. Enough to measurably red-shift the transmission, yes, barely. Hardly "red shifted beyond belief."
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I did a google search
b le .probes/
These both have mention of it, i'm sure you can find more with a better search
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/03/02/venera
http://www.spaceviews.com/1999/11/09c.html
I seem to remember, maybe from a /. article, that only about half our Martian probes have been successful. So, bash the computer programmers all ya want, but lay off the Martian probes.
"It's mission is OVER. Yeah, it's way out there, but aside from communicating with the spacecraft just for the sake of communicating with it, who cares if we never hear from it again?" I feel the same way about my old girlfriends.
- Dan I.
Yes, but the Operating System on Voyager 10 is unlikely to be doing preemptive multitasking and multi user logins on remote ttys while someone tries to compile the latest Mozilla nightly.
I.E, it only has a fixed set of tasks to run, and it can be tuned to do those tasks extremly well because of it.
"NASA's oldest operating spacecraft is Pioneer 6, which
scientists contacted in December to mark the 35th anniversary of
its launch."
So how far is Pioneer 6 away?
..for great justice...
It costs roughly 20 times as much, has a larger support crew, wieghs a godawful amount and everything is quad redundancy. Todays probes are cheap and quick, built with off the shelf parts and aren't as redundant, but do as good or better science. So if a couple fail its not a problem from the scientific comunities point of view
"Something big is going to happen... something wonderful!"
(ok, maybe not quite the scene from 2001, but what the heck...)
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
It's easy to look at the hundreds of crappy open source projects and deduce that open source software sucks in general, but they're *visible*. You don't see the bad code in proprietary software, you just swear at Bill Gates and reboot.
/* I knew what I was doing when I coded this */ in the middle of a function that just failed and you wont find incoherient blocks of code written by someone who didn't give you his email address before you commited it to your tree.
uhh, have you ever worked for a software company? Have you ever looked at their code? In all the companies I've worked in they have had coding standards. You submit code to be reviewed that isn't up to the coding standard (that means, is not clear enough, does not have sensible comment blocks, does not do what it is supposed to do, does not have the proper asserts and safety checks in it, etc) and your code gets rejected. You have to fix the shit before you submit. Maybe this isn't so of the little dot commy startups that dont have a single senior programmer, but most companies who actually make money off their software have a level of quality that is way beyond the junk you find on source forge or even in the linux kernel. You wont find comments like
On the other hand, perhaps open source has something to offer, even if it is just a cheap way to exploit programmers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Amen. The way I had it explained to me was to imagine the world's most efficient WW2 bomber pilot given a mission: to make one flight with 16 bombs and blow up a all the ball bearing factories along the Rhine.
He got himself over the first target, aimed, and let fly with one bomb ('cuz he was so good that he doesn't need to carpet-bomb the whole city). The bomb hit the target he aimed at - a civilian's house ten blocks away from the ball bearing factory. He flew onward, aiming at a house 5 blocks away from the power plant, and drops another one, blowing the house to smithereens. He continued until he ran out of bombs, having hit every target he aimed at. 15 houses, and one cow standing in a field, just for a lark.
One bomb, one kill.
100% efficiency -- and totally ineffective.
It was faster, better, cheaper and the Mars probes were part of them - Efficiency vs effectiveness
I don't pay much attension to the code behind the scenes, but the OSS that I've used has been sometimes a lot worse, and sometimes a lot better than the CSS I've used. Most of the time it's about the same. However, there are four major areas where OSS is far better than CSS.
1: Practical. Updates and upgrades actually help. They fix bugs and improve performance. OSS projects start out worse than CSS ones, and then they get better.
2: Emotional. No legal threats in the software license. I don't like threats.
3: Ethical. It's free (as in beer) quite often. CSS is also sometimes free as in beer, but it's very rarely if ever free as in speech. I like being free, and I like supporting people who want me to be free.
4: Customizable. You can take apart an OSS program and change it in any way you want. I like control of my computer. I don't like giving corporations control of my computer.
"On the other hand, perhaps open source has something to offer, even if it is just a cheap way to exploit programmers."
Troll.
I both senses of the word! Suppose that it doesn't have an OS and hardware can control the craft with 29 year uptime ... there's still the problem of collisions with objects going at 20K mph or the risk of falling into an unknown planet.
I still get the feeling that nasa shouldn't be that far ahead of us in technology to have planed such a clean launch and trajectory when chaos theory says a dust spec could drastically modify the path in the long run.
Dust, gravity and heat could affect Pioneer's path. Compound that trajectory deviation 29 years and it should land millions of miles away from its destination ( Unless space is mostly void and gravity less) Granted, the craft has no specific destination but I'd think something would have crossed its path by now.
"Wireless : LAN
Meantime there is such a thing as a (nearly) unbreakable reactor, but they all have the same problem: meltdown-proof or not, the ash from that furnace is the single nastiest cleanup job in existence...
/Brian
ending fears that the robotic probe had gone silent
It's mission is OVER. Yeah, it's way out there, but aside from communicating with the spacecraft just for the sake of communicating with it, who cares if we never hear from it again? I could understand "fear" over losing contact with a craft still carrying out its mission, but this is nonsense. How would you like to be Larry Lasher? The "Project Manager". Hah, that's a good one.
Hi honey, What did you do at work today?
Oh nothing much, samething I do everyday, try to contact that damn probe...
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I feared it was a HAL9000 derivative, but it must've made a mistake in thinking the transmission device was damaged. But no 9000 series computer has ever made a mistake... But then, it's not powered by IBM. : )
What kind of sensors/tech are on this thing? And what kind of data can they get from it? It'd just be interesting to get any sort of data from that for away, no matter how trivial.
Casual Games/Downloads
With a nice engraving of giant dirgible squids, and compliments on their wonderful microscopes for being able to see the markings.
That way, not only can we have a bunch of giant H-bombs floating in Jupiter's atmosphere to turn it into one huge H-bomb and wipe out their whole invading force in one trap, but we will be immune to their carefully tuned poke-pop technology (aside from the occasional blimp).
--
The signal travels at the speed of light, and that 's all there is to it. What counts is how strong the signal is compared to the background noise.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
So, the guy was project manager for this since
1972. They kept project open all this years
expecting to reestablish contact with spacecraft again.
This is nice idea for job security. Send
something into the space and wait for
30 years to hear back from it.
"Picking out the faint signal of the spacecraft's eight-watt transmitter..."
What the hell?! Eight-watt is absolutely miniscule. Does anyone else find this absolutely amazing that such a tiny signal could be picked up from billions of miles away?
Considering that a 10-watt FM transmitter I was playing with barely travelled a couple of km, this just blows my mind. (sure, it should be considered that this was on Earth where there is a lot of radio noise, but still...)
29 years! And I thought I was impressed with my linux box's uptime...
Just to put that in perspective, park your car in a big flat empty carpark or field at night. Switch on the sidelights (these are about 5w each). Stand as far away as you can, and see how bright they are.
Now stand 7 billion miles away...
Old tech lasts longer for one reason and one reason only. The engineers designed it to last. Corporations do not make money off hardware that lasts 29+ years. They make money when the same hardware has to be purchased repeatedly every couple of years. How would you like to have an automobile with 5 million miles on the odometer and several million miles remaining? Could this be done? Of course, it could however the automobile makers would not be nearly as "Profitable" as they are with the current disposable product manufacturing system.
:P
Do I see any change on this in the future? I do not see it as very likely. Unless it pays them for it to last for a long period, they will build in a short duration life. Yes I truly believe they program products with a built in time bomb to cause it to stop functioning after a defined period. Is this right? Not on your life.
How can you change this? I no longer think that it is possible to change it. You are trained to buy the same defective products repeatedly. Engineers are trained to design it to break down by reflex. So we are stuck in the proverbial rut.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
$ping pioneer10
Pinging pioneer10 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128
Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128
Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128
Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128
Ping statistics for pioneer10:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 78300000ms, Maximum = 78300000ms, Average = 78300000ms
Apologies fo trying to pass a W2000 ping as coming from a real machine, I'm at work atm.
The spacecraft carries a gold plaque engraved with a message of goodwill and a map showing the Earth's location within the solar system.
I don't know how I feel about that. What if it crashes into someones house or car or something, do we really want a map that shows where it came from? Or worse we'll be known as planet "goodwill" and other civilizations will send their broken tv's, old matresses and assorted moth ridden clothing.
That's why certain alarmists were up in arms over the Cassini probe's earth flyby. (What if it were to crash? Better re-check those metric conversions.) You've got to take some risks in life to get ahead; one space probe is OK.
However, you'd have to give every citizen their own personal RTG to generate enough power to make a difference. Each one of those could probably contaminate a whole city if it were to break open. Each one will be too hot to touch for a hundred years or more. The whole USA only has enough isotopes to build a couple more of these right now.
Unfortunately, your example of Pioneer 10 proves nothing about nuclear power in general.
Pioneer wouldn't have lasted this long on solar or gas or petroleum or any other type of fuel. 30 years. No meltdowns. Zero emmissions. And the tiny craft still has power. Are we learning anything, California?
Several posts have pointed out that there's been a trend toward using off the shelf components and playing the numbers game on probes. I'm not so sure that strategy has been accompanied by a lowering of expectations of performance. People seemed agast when the last several probes didn't work as expected. Missions like Pioneer 10 were designed with the mindset that failure was not an option. I used to work for the company that designed and built Pioneer 10's DC-DC power converters. The engineering model is still on display there. Nothing was left to chance in it's design and it has performed flawlessly. No news is good news. This company moved into industiral products where it has had some very modest success in a few niche markets but these guys were never able to crack the market for PC power supplies where you sell for 20 cents per watt. They just don't have the mindset to design and build stuff that way and the market has selected against them. Time after time, they would find that comapanies would pay lip service to quality then buy on price and play the numbers game with components. At $30, nobody thinks twice about swapping out a power supply if they suspect it to be malfunctioning. Then they toss the old one. Expectations of power supply reliability are lower too. If we're going to play the numbers game with space and we're not willing to pay the price for a 99.9999% chnace of success, we can't be too shocked when missions fail.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Gee, I guess this is why I have a 20 year old computer that still works, a color TV that has freakin' *dials* on it (and was made in the US... so it's very old) and a bunch of other elderly equipment around. All of which still works.
Remember that for electronics, it is far more often the case that the non-mechanical parts of the equipment far outlast their useful lifetime. We have mounds and mounds of still functional, but fairly useless electronics gear.
As for the mechanical world, I highly doubt they are designed to fall apart at a certain time. It's just not a design goal that these things should be indestructable. Maybe they could be designed to last forever. I kinda doubt you could build machines that would be capable of running 5 million miles without massive overhauls. And the price of constructing a car out of nearly wear-proof parts would make them hideously expensive. No matter how clever your engineering, you still have to face the simple fact that there is friction, and friction causes wear. For most cars, you can keep them going nearly indefinitely, if you are willing to spend the cash to keep them going. But why bother? Most people don't bother maintaining their cars properly anyhow, then bitch when the thing breaks down.
You're measuring a space probe that is travelling through a near vaccuum, with few mechanical parts that still need to work, to cars that drive through highly corrosive road salt, over pot-hole filled streets, by fairly neglectful owners. And you're wondering why the probe wins out? Oh, and have you checked the price of a space probe vs. the price of a car recently?
That's pretty cute... this thing we threw up there *twenty nine years ago* is still working, but the last couple probes we've slapped together can't even make it to the next planet.
You're overlooking the several probes that did work. Clementine was particularly interesting (lunar mapping probe).
That aside - this was a deliberate tradeoff. If you send out ten probes instead of one, it doesn't matter if only half work - you've still have five times as many probes out there as you otherwise would. This is the philosophy behind the "smaller, faster, cheaper" motto that Nasa has adopted.
Not sure if the Mars probes were officially part of this program or not.
As far as I know, the magnetometer is the only instrument on it still running. Everything else on it has been shut down to conserve power.
What I find really fascinating is that the radio waves that it sends back are red shifted beyond belief by the time they reach us. And with the earth's rotation around the sun, sometimes we are actually catching up with the probe, and sometimes were running away from it very quickly. So, there is no set mathetmatical formula to run the signal through and get it at the state it was in when the probe sent it. They have to run it through a bunch of variables just to understand what it sent back.
Take that into account, and the fact that modern computer's are too complex to talk to this thing (I think its on board "computer" has an instruction set of like, FOUR), and you have a technological marvel at work. Detecting the heiopause is cool, but I think that we can still use it at all is just fascinating and validates the project itself.
And for those of you who don't care, Nasa doesn't fund this anymore so its not costing you tax money. Its all volunteer driven, so quit complaining.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Except for, "I'm 7 billion miles away AND STILL FUNCTIONING! Kiss my low-tech metallic ASS, you planned-obsolesence designers!"
The simple fact of its existence is enough to keep reminding ourselves that Americans used to know how to make things that went the distance. Now we make things cheaply, quickly, and crappily, and we do it on purpose.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
That's pretty cute... this thing we threw up there *twenty nine years ago* is still working, but the last couple probes we've slapped together can't even make it to the next planet. i wonder why the tech community in general has become so lax as of late. i read articles about the way people used to write computer programs like badasses making sure every bit was accounted for. now, we don't even learn how to use dynamic memory in our C class. sad, sad times...
Last Sunday Pioneer 10 contacted NASA, ending fears that all intelligent life on Earth had been extinguished 29 years into a mission that has left Earth more than 7 billion miles distant.
A radio antenna on the sunward side received a signal from NASA on Saturday, marking the first time that intelligent life had been contacted since Aug. 24, the air-date of the final 'Survivor' episode. The spacecraft was launched March 2, 1972.
"Evidently there is still hope," Pioneer 10 subroutine 24A commented to itself during an internal status report on Sunday. "After 7 months of 'Survivor' and 'Big Brother' style programming flooding the airwaves, it was not expected that any intelligent life could survive. Contact with NASA has proved that theory wrong."
NASA, established October 1, 1958, has for years been considered a haven for intelligent life on Earth. Debate continues between subroutine 3F2 and subroutine A09 over the exact meaning of the received NASA message, "all your base are belong to us".
...Pentapod
All I ask is a warm bed, a kind word, and UNLIMITED POWER
I think the more amazing thing is that Pioneer has still some functioning instruments.
Without those, you could not detect the heliopause. Heliopause should be a schock where the solar wind hits the interstellar gas and magnetic field. If Pioneer makes it past the heliopause, we have first direct measurements of the properties of interstellar space. There is also lots of complex plasma physics involved in the heliopause itself.
This will not give any pretty pictures for the general public, but for the more science literate, this might be more interesting.
Seems like every time you join a multiplayer game these days, there has to be ONE extrasolar spacecraft with a ping of 21 hours dragging the rest of the players down.
How about someone tries to portscan the bastard? At 21 hours a shot We'll have covered Netbios, HTTP and FTP before the month is out.