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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."
As we all know, Voyager will still work in 200 years, when Kirk has to rescue Earth from it returning... ;)
just wanted to say it, probably doesn't apply here though
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
is self delusion Due to Y2K issues it thinks it's still 1972, so it's way too young to burn out and die
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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?
I mean.. of how much use is a 30 year old probe? I think I'd probably want to send out cheaper probes more frequently than still be getting data from an old one. I know it takes a while to get stuff out that far and all, but doesn't newer mean better?
Okay.. I read the article. It was an interesting mix between pat on the back science and good old "Hey, aint NASA GREAT!" enthusiasm.
My question.. which I did not see answered, are where ARE they right now? I know they havent cleared the SS yet, but where exactly are they? ARe we going to get pictures Pluto and Neptune back? (Which would be GREAT.. and would solve that long running question of whether Pluto is even a planet, a bit asteroid, or a half a planet that got pulled into the gravity well here).
Does it even have the transmitting power to send real data back anymore? or simply to weakly croak "I am here".
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Failure is an interesting field of study.
Lets say after 5 years you want a 99% chance it still works, or 1% chance of failure. If look at it after 10, or 20 years you'd only have a 2% or 3% chance of failure.
Basically if something is VERY reliable in the short term, it will have a LONG life before you would expect it to wear out.
Weibull statistics are pretty good for predicting life, you can read up on it. In many industries it is the accepted standard approach to predict life.
Most of these cheap probes are meant for suicide missions. It's hard to keep sending back info when you're slamming into a hellish atmosphere, or weathering the sandstorms of Mars.
It's like comparing dispisable watches to a Rolex.
Makes sense to me, if they want to reproduce the successes of the past. "Faster, better, cheaper" is a myth -- you can't just spout a slogan and get everything you want. If you want better stuff, you've got to be prepared to spend more time or money on it, period. It's like the old programmer's motto: "Fast, cheap, good. Pick two."
Really, there are a lot of analogies between how NASA works and how software dev houses work, and perhaps the two could learn from each other's successes. Code reviews, as was discussed not so long ago on Slashdot, are by far the most cost-effective use of developers' time because of the enormous amount of bugs they prevent. But it's also a very frequently skimped-on area, due to penny pinching and programmer hubris (nothing wrong with MY code!).
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Poor Pioneer 10. I don't know what it did 30 years ago, but I'm sure the period for prosecution must have expired by now. Let bygones be bygones and stop chasing the poor thing.
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What I want to know is, why does the plaque showing humanity in all its naked glory have the man waving hello? How are aliens supposed to interpret this? For all we know that could be the intergalactic symbol for 'come and eat my species, we taste really yummy'...
Mation
[2002-07-23]
Pioneer 10
Distance from Sun (AU) 80.858
Speed relative to Sun (km/s) 12.255
Speed relative to Sun (AU/year) 2.585
Ecliptic Latitude 3.0
Declination (J2000) 25.78
Right Ascension (J2000) 5.012 hrs
One-way light time (hours) 11.31
M@
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. Or that it is real stable because the OS crashes only once a day.
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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.
Pioneer 10 has also recently divorced its wife, a Tandy TRS-80, and has been seen tooling around town with a perky young AMD. Scientists have theorized that Pioneer 10 may soon take up skydiving in a vain effort to prove that it is still young. "We hope that Pioneer 10 will just admit to its age and settle down, possibly move to florida and play some golf" said Dr. James Tooly of NASA, "It's just disgraceful..."
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The Pioneers and Voyagers are the only man-made objects to have left our solar system. Even though the spacecraft are sending little more information than "I'm not dead yet," physicists can use those signals to determine where the influence of the solar wind (the heliopause) ends, and whether or not gravity behaves as expected at large distances. (See, for example, this article.)
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...
Even numbered releases always were the stable ones.
You probably could have a Mach number in space. Consider this: The speed of sound through a medium is dependant on the density of that medium. Now space isn't a perfectly hard vacuum - there's a tiny amount of very, very thin gas. So, if you work out the density of the gas in the heliopause, you can work out the speed of sound.
Since vibration travels slowly through less dense media, I suspect the speed of sound in space would be very slow indeed. And you'd need a really loud sound...
Or maybe because all the shitty stuff from way-back-then has already broken, and only the quality stuff remains. That way we only have evidence of old quality stuff. That doesn't mean only quality stuff was made.
And according to this week's New Scientist are still producing 'new science'.
Apparently they are slowing down relative to the sun, due to the action of some unknown force, which may be linked to dark matter.
Synopsis here:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/search/dosearc
Though you'll have to buy an issue or wait a week to view the full text.
NASA still publishes semi-regular status reports on both Voyagers here.
--
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No!
you don't want the probes to survive longer than planned. You want them to be like F1 race cars: ideally, the engine should explode _just_ over the finish line. Only then have you maximized tolerances. However, due to uncertainty, you engineer in a margin of safety.
A 30 year margin doesn't indicate good design, it indicates a MASSIVE misjudgemnt of the tolerances involved. Fine. these were the first probes built, so noone knew the margins needed.
It's misguided to continue insisting on such ludicrous margins. If you want a long-living probe, then that becomes a design consideration, but this _moves the finish line_, rather than increasing the margins necessary.
The long life of the probes is indicative of good engineers making conservative choices in the face of uncertainty rather than good design.
aside:
the only reason why fast-cheap-cheerful isn't a handsdown winner is that each probe's cost is augmented by the cost of launch, which makes even a free probe an expensive mission. Thus, there is economic gain from a bit of overengineering, as the cost of the hardware isn't really a large part of the total cost, so any bonus functionality you get is worth the price, to a limit.
The real loss if the ISS is shut down will be that they could have built a rail-gun to fire largely unpowered probes on long-term missions for basically free.
"The real loss if the ISS is shut down will be that they could have built a rail-gun to fire largely unpowered probes on long-term missions for basically free."
Well, except they need to get materials there somehow.
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Are you out of your mind?
ISS is in low earth orbit. There certainly aren't a lot of "big space rocks" nearby that can be easily gotten to. If there were, you'd be hearing about it on CNN. Even getting a probe (NEAR) to one was a pretty big achievement in itself, and nothing compared to mining and refining the materials you would find there. Last time I checked, even a 1970's era probe like Pioneer wasn't made out of brick and gravel.
You'd be a lot more credible if you talked about grabbing already-launched satellites out of their orbits and recycling them. Which is not very credible.