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Happy 30th Birthday, Pioneer 10

Posted by timothy on from the not-yet-over-the-hill dept.

tlon writes: "Pioneer 10, the spacecraft that brought us the first pictures of Jupiter, turned 30 today. Launched in 1972, the probe is now some 7.4 billion miles away, as it cruises out towards Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus. NASA will attempt to contact the spacecraft today, (it was successfully contacted last year), but the round trip time is over 22 hours. How's that for a ping latency? See Nasa's Pioneer 10 Page for more details."

1 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. BOTH pages unreachable? by DerKlempner · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    They can contact a 30-year-old space probe that's more than 7 billion miles away (about 1/1000 of a light-year!), but they still have problems running a web server that can handle more than 3 hits a day.

    Combined with all their recent Mars probes' failures, I guess this just goes to show that the folks at NASA haven't been able to show any real progress with the advance of technology.

    --
    UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.