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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."
the round trip time is over 22 hours. How's that for a ping latency?
Could be worse. They could be trying to get to it through @Home.
--saint
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.
I'm the stranger...posting to
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Enjoy!
Do not read this sig.
here
and
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Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
Once this sucker crosses the neutral zone, it becomes fair game
NASA will attempt to contact the spacecraft today, (it was successfully contacted last year), but the round trip time is over 22 hours
How, exactly, is "today" defined? Do they send out a signal at 1AM and hope to get a reply back at 11PM?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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!
The amazing thing is that the satellite is sending out a signal with as much power as maybe a watch battery, and we're receiving it from over 10^9 km away...
Of course, the receiving dish is as big as a football field, but still.
So what is the ip address of this thing so i can perform a port scan :D
:)
Would make a killer proxy tho
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
What if NASA sent out a space probe every year with pretty much the same trajectory. This way each probe could have modern technology, be able to probe faster/better, and if they kept launching them every year, the farthest one would only have to transmit as far as the one release the year after the first was launched so that the 2nd one would amplify and retransmit to the 3rd one and so on and so on.
ok, now bring on the inevitable jokes about a beowolf cluster of probes.
why contact it? Whats it going to say? Still dark. Still dark. Still dark.
Remind me never to move next door to you. Most people I know respond to new neighbors by bringing over food and generally being nice. Your first instinct, I take it, would be to kill them.
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Imagine if one day we *do* see an extraterrestrial probe land here. As far advanced as it will appear to us, it may only be an ancient relic of its creating civilisation.
Decentralization: the brief interval between the decline of one centralized regime and rise of another.
Yes - but we only found out about that in 1977 - 5 years after Pioneer was launched.
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
Radio waves ARE light. they travel at the same speed, cuz they are the same thing.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
Check out The Speed of Light for a reference to the fact that light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation are the same thing, and therefore travel at the same speed.
Now, if they're travelling through different mediums, then their speed is different. An interesting chart showing the different speeds through different mediums can be found here.
BroadbandPig
To be fair to the poster, there is also an effect due to traveling through the dilute plasma of interstellar space. Honest to goodness, there is an Insterstellar Medium whose magnetic properties affect the propogation of radio waves. See, for example, this page.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
DH - No, no, no, Light speed's too slow!
CS - Light speed to slow?
DH - That's right we'll have to go straight to Ludacrious Speed!
CS - <shock> Ludacrious speed! Sir, we've never gone that fast before!
DH - WHAT's THE MATTER COLONEL SANDERS?!? CHICKEN?!?
CS - <voice cracking> Prepare ship! </voice cracking>Perpare ship for Ludacrious speed! Close all shops in the mall, secure all animals in the zoo! Cancel the three ring circus!
DH - <grabbing microphone> Give me that you petty excuse for an officer! Now hear this! Ludacrious speed!
CS - Sir, you better buckle up!
DH - Awww, bucke this! Ludacrious speed! GO!
****************
What's truly sad is it's all from memory...
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
first, as everyone here has said, in space radio = light in speed.
second, noone has cracked quantum physics enough to discover a way to transmit using another dimension or creating or using wormholes or other FTL technology theories. AS soon as you see proof of multi-dimensional detection, or wormholes, trans-positional quarks, etc.. then I would guess that comms would be the first to follow.
so either you need to wait about 100 years or hope that a major breakthrough in chaos mathematics or quantum physics.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just a question.
Check out the Relativity and FTL Travel FAQ for a better explanation than I can give. I for one hope that Einstein is wrong... the universe is so much more exciting in Star Wars.
So radio waves will travel slightly less quickly than visible light.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
In what has proven to be one of the most sensational discoveries in recent times, scientists have announced that they have discovered a probe originating from a far away alien race. This probe contains a plaque containing a mysterious cryptic message. We go live to an update from the scientific team studying the probe...
"After much careful studying of the plaque and it's contents we believe we have determined the approximate nature of the message it contains..."
"It says: Get your free porn here!"
You're using her as bait, Master!
1. Are wethere yet?
2. Are we there yet
3. Arewe there yet?
4. Arewe there yet?
5. Are we there yet?
6. Arewe there yet?
7. Are we there yet?
8. Are wethere yet?
9. Are we there yet?
10. Are we there yet?
Like the American Indians who fed the Pilgrims?
And did the pilgrims need the American Indians' help finding America? Any civilization advanced enough to wage a successful war across interstellar distances certainly won't need a roadmap from us to get here. They'll be picking up Gilligan's Island reruns LONG before they find Voyager; so put away the shotgun Wilbur.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
According to general relativity, gravity propagates at the speed of light. There aren't any known shortcuts, even in theory, around the problem of communicating any information whatsoever faster than lightspeed. It might be possible to do something with quantum nonlocality, but I've yet to see a credible suggestion for doing that.
Of corse, you already knew that (0.04c would be too good to be true).
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.
Pioneer 10 is part of a Gravity Mystery that is yet to be solved. A story about it:
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/05/21/gravity.m ystery/
Gravity still stumps physicists like almost nothing else. This may be a hint for a new breakthru in our understanding of gravity.
Table-ized A.I.
Pioneer 10 has responded!
You're actually off by about a factor of 10.
7.4 billion miles ~= 11.8 billion km
Which would mean that it actually takes 11 hours to get there at the speed of light... just like the radio message sent by NASA that was mentioned in the article. =) Doh!
Am I alone in finding the fact that there was a mistake making distance conversions in a thread about NASA rather funny?
Deep-space spacecraft tend to me much longer lived than Earth orbiting ones as they aren't subject to Van-Allen radiation, nasty atomic oxygen effects plus the thermal cycling stresses you get from going from sunshine into shadow and back into sunshine every obit.
You should really compare Pioneer 10 v. Galileo, Cassini or other, similar-costing, "full QA" projects from NASA. The "better, faster, cheaper" Mars probes that gained a lot of noteriety in their failures are NOT good comparisons based on their cost and lack of equivalent QA/testing.
Simple engineering risk analysis showed NASA that the orders of magnitude in additional cost are worth it to guarantee an over 99% chance of success, versus less than 50% in the BFC approach. NASA will no longer attempt to build probes like those three Mars BFC projects (of which, only one was a success) again.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
If anyone in nearby solar systems is making as much noise in space as we are would we be able to hear it?
How far are we detectable?
If anyone out there is doing things similar to those that we do should we be hearing them?
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Just saw on CNN that contact was made via a radio telescope just east of Los Angeles.
Too bad there are no harddrives big enough on that thing to be able to backup all the earth's history as we know it. We could still do it, back up everything we can possibly think of onto non magnetic storage devices, some DVDs I guess and send all this stuff to space.
On a lighter note, what are the taxes for running a business out of a satelite flying some 7.4 billion km away from earth in space? Could we have a beow... sorry
You can't handle the truth.