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Whisper Heard From Pioneer 10
Irishman writes "NASA has heard from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft for the first time since March. Unfortunately, it is too faint to get scientific data from the craft. CNN has the story here.
Considering that the craft is twice the distance from the Sun as Pluto is and that it has spent 30 years subjected to space, this is amazing! Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
They can, you just don't want to pay for it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.
Who says they don't? I'd say that the fact that you won't be using the same computer 30 years from now has very little to do with reliability. In which case, why bother designing for a 30 year lifespan?
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simple reason
Coordination.
Besides having a large dish on earth do communication is one thing... and having communications system based on a remote probe is another.
Moreover the Voyager serves the purpose too. It is farther than Pioneer... infact it is the farthest man made object. It is working perfectly right now. Rather than send repeaters after the sent out probes what is preffered is to send better probes in another direction.
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Where exactly is the Pioneer headed to. Is it intended to eventually make a circular path and eventually head home, or will it just continue to wander out into space? If we could start planting satellites in circular synchronous orbits, perhaps we could eventually have a transmission array that could gradually extend throughout the solar system.
Sending out probes is cool when we can collect info, but it's not really useful if the data isn't able to be processed. A probe that wanders away isn't really very useful, unless perhaps somebody picks it up and sends it home or comes to visit.
"On the rare occasions when astronomers have coaxed even sparse data from Pioneer 10 in recent years, they have used the readings to investigate everything from cosmic rays to chaos theory to gravitational mechanics."
Are we getting accurate data? Do we know that the data coming back is reliable? Should we trust Pioneer 10 and the data that it is sending us? Note: I'm glad it is still operating. That really is a feat. But, we should temper our enthusiam with a heatlhy dose of skepticism.
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Sure. That would be more links in the chain, which means more places for the communication to breakdown. If one link goes, there goes your entire chain.
NASA's best use of probes would be to send out newer, better probes in different directions.
If we don't even bother to look, how do we know there's nothing worth looking at? :-)
Oh, then you've the temperature thing. Commercial grade components won't handle sub-zero celcius. Industrial grade goes to -40 and military/space will support -50.
Space is 5'K, which is -268 celcius. The difference in rates of thermal expansion of metals and plastics would be enough to shatter most components, at that temperature.
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Macs have nothing on the Apple // series. I've seen too many with broken floppy drives (the original "SuperDrive") and burned out logic boards and power supplies.
The Apple // series was the pinnacle of 'Keep It Simple Stupid' computing. Maybe if NASA kept its newer probes to the Pioneer/Voyager KISS philosophy they wouldn't be crashing into Mars or simply crashing their programs.
Simplicity = reliability
You don't pay for "quality" when you buy a Lexus. You pay for the fact that it's a dressed up Toyota. A far more meaningful comparison would be between a Toyota and a Pontiac.
That comparison would unlikely support your hyperbole quite so well.
Modern Apples are little more than white box PC's with another expensive brand name label slapped on them.
Suns aren't that expensive either unless you buy hardware that has no PC equivalent.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Well, nothing you can see. The edge of the heliosphere (where the electromagnetic influence of the sun gets overwhelemed by background radiation) has long been a holy grail for astrophysicists. Pioneer 10 has the instruments on board to sense the edge, if only we could communicate with it.
(or at least they did)
They were called PDP-11's. I believe it was a story linked here of a PDP-11 that had been running a steel mill for over 20 years and was entombed in a brick room with no entryway. When the thing finally threw something they asked for replacement parts because if the thing had run that long without problems why replace it?
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True, radio communications just aren't going to cut it. We can pick up radio-type signals from stars, but these are... well, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking stars. This probe is a walkie-talkie with a half-dead 9 volt battery in comparison.
Any signal that's actually going to get anywhere would either:
- be optical
- be based on some kind of technology we haven't invented yet
- be repeated through a series of probes orbiting around other celestial bodies that do not generate significant EM interference themselves
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy.
I'm sure if you're willing to pay $350 million, most PC makers would be willing to work with you on that.
Considering I paid roughly 0.00000228% of that, I'm willing to deal with a reboot every month or so.
-Bill
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Pioneer 10:
I sense a slashdot dupe.
Mods, and idiots, I know its about galileo, but if you read the actual post, it mentions (with the same link as this article): Meanwhile they also contacted pioneer 10 (64 bytes from pioneer10.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=80700000 ms)" .
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
How is this defined? It seems to me that the field's strength would never actually be zero, but would grow more infintessimally weak.
And what is interesting beyond heliopause? Would there be some observable effect on the satellite? Or is it just that we no longer have to worry about Sol pulling Pioneer 10 back in?
Magenetic fields never end. Inverse cube law all the way out to the end of the universe.
"Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
Barring the radiation from space and other warranty-voiders, PC hardware has (except for the occasional bad capacitors) been very sturdy. My PCjr still runs, my Leading Edge XT still runs. What is so unreal that I cannot even fathom it, is that the software has run on this thing for as long as it has, without getting corrupted, always booting fine when they need to reboot, etc. Only now in this late hour are major companies starting to remember the K.I.S.S. Principle that led their forefathers, and in doing so, counting on linux. The fewer variables, the more dependable the result.
Not to mention that, at 82AU away from the sun, the amount of solar heating is negligible.
Take our solar system. Do you realize that a cube containing everything in the system would be made up of mostly... nothing?! Why should areas outside of out solar system have more stuff? See, in real life, things are much different:
(From the Pioneer Mission Status page)
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.
Yeah, right.