Happy 30th Birthday, Pioneer 10

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."

Comments

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[SevenTowers]

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Re:I have an idea

[cperciva]

Two major problems:

First, hardware fails occasionally. The probes would have to be able to send their signals back at least two hops in order to avoid having one failed probe "orphan" many others.

Second, the trajectories rely upon a particular alignment of planets. If we sent out probes year after year, they'd end up going in completely different directions.

Contact made!

[Gogo Dodo]

Pioneer 10 has responded!