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...