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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.
I have 16 years experience is software QA for defense contractors. I can pick up any file from any "Open Source" operating system or software package, and I can find a dozen defects without trying. Most "Open Source" software is so bad it hurts to look at it. Mind you, there is a lot of shitty source code in the commercial world too. But most defense projects have higher standards, and that is to what I'm accustomed. What I see in Open Source is really bad from a QA point of view.
The people doing the orbit calcuations did them by hand with a slide rule. The high priced nasa computers were just used to veryify the results. Odd thing is that in many places they just used 3 as a value for pi.
I used to know some of the people that built the thing. I even saw it launch. It was quite impressive. It seems that the probe out lasted many of the workers that built it.
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.
After all, although we think we know what's out there between the stars, we have very little direct evidence. That's an especially important issue nowadays because of indications that the expansion of the universe is accelerating -- there must be something out there generating the negative pressure (which effectively produces the opposite of gravity)!
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)
Well if you were to read the Pioneer web page that was linked in the article, you'd know that
I'm not sure what that means, but it looks like they are tracking it for a reason!
jmp
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yes, the actual mission is over. So? With the same logic we should dump everything that is no longer in actual use, even if the item in question has some novelty value. I'd guess that museums would cease to exist rather soon. ;) Checking for its state should not take much resources if done once in a few months. And personally, I'm curious to see how long it is going to function and how far to get before contact is lost, even if that doesn't give much actual new and useful information.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
It was instrumented up for exploration of the outer planets. Unless it passes some large planet or other celestial body it's not going to perform any more meaningful tasks. This link describes the mission and instruments it carries. A quick list:
- Helium Vector Magnetometer
- Plasma Analyzer
- Charged Particle Instrument
- Cosmic Ray Telescope
- Geiger Tube Telescope
- Trapped Radiation Detector
- Meteoroid Detector
- Asteroid-Meteoroid Experiment
- Ultraviolet Photometer
- Imaging Photopolarimeter
- Infrared Radiometer
Other than the cosmic ray telescope none of these are geared towards anything interesting once you get into interplanetary space. Even the valu of that is questionable today since huge strides have been made since 1975 in cosmic ray science.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.