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Pioneer 10 Still Running After 30 years
evilempireinc writes "According to this article in Scientific American, Pioneer 10 is still functioning 30 years after it was launched in 1972, and is still sending back scientific data. The article mentions that two other old space craft, Voyager, and IMP-8 are still functioning after over 20 years as well due to overbuilt construction and redundant systems. Can't help but wonder if the present generation of "faster, better, cheaper" probes will ever live this long though."
Anyone who went to elementary school in the 70's ought to remember the cafeteria milk cartons with little factoids about Pioneer, Voyager, and a bunch of other spacecraft. I wonder if anyone has pictures of those old things?
This graphic from The Telegraph article shows where Pioneer 10 is (outside of our Solar System). It also shows pictures it took of Jupiter (1973), Saturn (1979) and Pluto (1983). It has been almost 20 years since it left our Solar System. Apparently it is heading towards the "Eye" of the Taurus Bull constellation, and will take 2 million years to reach it. however it is slowing down by some "mysterious" force.
I seriously question the long-term of any semiconductor electronics built today. No, there are no moving parts - except the electrons and any atoms they may knock about as they scurry on their way from source to drain and through the wires.
Shipping reliable semiconductors has always been a lifetime issue. There is a "bathtub curve" of failures, with a higher number of early fallout, then a very reliable main lifetime, then failures rise again at wearout. Wearout happens through mechanisms like electromigration, where the electrons physically knock the metalization atoms out of place. In addition, all of the hot process steps like diffusion continue to happen, just at much slower rates. High reliability semiconductors are "burned in", run at higher temperatures and voltages than normal, to force them past that early fallout and throw those parts away.
So what does this mean to space electronics? First, radiation just doesn't help. You can design rad-hard, but the crystal lattice is still taking damage, and it's cumulative. The low temperature helps to slow down wearout mechanisms.
But the big problem is modern technology. The smaller geometries will simply wear out faster. Finer wires are more subject to electromigration, though using copper is an improvement because the atoms are heavier than aluminum. But gates are thinner, as are diffusions and spacings, non of which helps long life. When designing a burn-in regimen, it's getting tougher to get past early failures without approaching wearout. While frequency can be reduced to increase lifetime, scaling voltage down is getting tougher, because we're running darned close to minimums, already.
One of my pet thoughts is the idea of electronics for a multi-generation starship. Other than slowing it down, stopping as much as possible, reducing voltages, etc, it's a tough problem. Maybe the best way is to scrape the bargain bins for old technology.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Actually, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 have both cleared the solar system... well, depending on what you define as the solar system.
p ioneer/PNhome.html).
Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Neptune and passed beyond the (at the time) furthest orbiting planet on June 13, 1983 (see this page). It hasn't passed the heliopause yet (distance where the solar wind ceases), at least not that anyone can determine.
Pioneer 10 is not the probe furthest from the sun, however. Apparantly that honor goes to Voyager 1, which is moving faster and exceeded Pioneer 10's heliocentric distance on Feb 17, 1998, but it's still well over 7 billion miles away. (see http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/
One interesting thing I found while looking for this is that only Pioneer 10 is moving in the opposite direction from our solar system (relative to the galactic core). Voyager 1 & 2, as well as Pioneer 11 are moving "in front of" us, while Pioneer 10 is moving the opposite direction. This could result in some really useful information about the edges of the solar system -- except that apparantly Pioneer 10's power system is going to run out of juice in a few years (solar powered I guess - the W/m^2 will probably be too low to power the probe at that point).
And no, we're not getting pictures of Neptune or Pluto. You determine these things at time of launch -- we've been doing astronomical calculations for a few hundred years and know where the planets are going to be far ahead of time. Pioneer 10 wasn't scheduled to make a flyby of anything but Jupiter because the orbits were wrong.
And yes, it is still sending back data. As is Pioneer 6, which is still orbiting the sun at about 74 million miles (inside the Earth's orbit). But, like I said, apparantly that's not going to be much longer for Pioneer 10. Shame... but one heck of a legacy to its designers. And just think - in a couple million years we'll be able to pick it up in the vicinity of Aldebaran.
(solar powered I guess - the W/m^2 will probably be too low to power the probe at that point).
Nope. Actually, solar panels are not a practical means of powering a spacecraft beyond the asteroid belt, and these probes go far, far beyond that.
Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, Ulysses, Galileo, and Cassini (to name many of the "big" and famous probes that are out there right now) are all nuclear powered. They carry radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) that carry plutonium as a fuel source. Surprisingly (?), the Viking I and II landers that touched down on Mars in 1976 are also nuclear-powered.
The probes are gradually dying because their plutonium fuel is running out, not because the sun is fading away. At the distances at which many of these probes travel, the Sun appears (from their location) simply as a bright start among many other stars.
i am a soviet space shuttle