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

Now that is engineering

[ColGraff]

If they do actually manage to contact the probe, that would be very, very cool. They don't build 'em like this anymore, gentlemen - all you need to do to see that is look at the Mars probes. What's really goofy is how now, one of the farthest man-made objects from Earth is completely, mind-bogglingly obsolete from a computing standpoint.

Re:Now that is engineering

[Lumpy]

and that is another example of writing bug-free code. (something that programmers still claim cannot happen) That probe was built by some awesome engineers... with a awesome budget...

That's a whole lotta time!

[El Pollo Loco]

I'm impressed that something built in 1972 is still functioning. Especially when you consider the rigors of space travel, that's quite a feat!

I think NASA beat everybody with this:

[Anonymous Coward]

All the wear, pitting, and erosion that Pioneer 10 has sustained are probably over now. The asteroid belt and the severe conditions of Jupiter have already been experienced. Now, Pioneer is in the vacuum of space where the average spatial density of molecules is one trillionth the density of the best vacuum we can draw on Earth. We expect Pioneer to last an indeterminate period of time, probably outlasting its home planet, the Earth. In 5 billion years, the Sun will become a red giant, expand, envelop the orbit of the Earth, and consume it. Pioneer will still be out there in interstellar space. Erosional processes in the interstellar environment are largely unknown, but are very likely less efficient than erosion within the solar system, where a characteristic erosion rate, due largely to micrometeoritic pitting, is of the order of 1 Angstrom/yr. Thus a plate etched to a depth ~ 0.01 cm should survive recognizable at least to as distance ~ 10 parsecs, and most probably to 100 parsecs. Accordingly, Pioneer 10 and any etched metal message aboard it are likely to survive for much longer periods than any of the works of Man on Earth.


Read that last sentence again. Pioneer 10 is likely to become one of the longest lasting things that mankind has ever created. Think deeply.... that is one heavy-duty accomplishment.