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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."
Why didn't NASA send out repeaters behind it ? I'd imagine that a series of repeaters behind it would be able to get information back to us on earth...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Apart from all the moronic comments about sturdy computers (Nice going Irishman, trolling in the story), Isn't this a clue about the silence in space? You know, the Drake equation? How strong must a signal be, to be heard? Pioneer is only 2x orbit of Pluto away from the Sun, and already impossible to listen to. Nearest star is 4.2 light years away, and nearest galaxy is "just" 75,000 light years away. How strong signal would be needed to communicate these distances. I know the Pioneer signal is only a few milli (micro?) watts, but still...
J.
People don't buy quality, they tend to buy the cheapest they can get away with.
The Pioneer project wasn't cheap, they got what they paid for.
Computers I don't care, they're so cheap, and advancing so quickly I only need it to last 2-3 years. I would like my hard drive to last a bit longer, but the rest who cares.
I don't believe that's actually always the case. I have a friend who works for the Surrey Space Centre on very small satellites - I was chatting to him down the pub about it one day and I was quite surprised to find out that it ran on an ordinary StrongArm Chip running at something like 133Mhz (Sorry - I don't recall the exact speed).
However, I suppose it's possible that the nanosatellite they built was sufficiently close to the earth to be sheilded from the radiation you speak of...
They are not stupid enough to make it, rather.
Imagine you're selling some piece of hardware, you'd rather make sure it breaks shortly after the end of its warranty, so that you can sell more of it, rather than have one that lasts so long you get out of business before selling its replacement.
Microsoft, despite working on software rather than hardware, has adopted a similar model of quick obsolescence of what it sells. It seems to work.
"But Pioneer 10, now more than twice the distance from the sun as Pluto, continues to serve a valuable scientific function as it approaches the edge of the solar system."
I don't understand this.
Is the solar system larger than the orbit of Pluto? If so, what defines it?
The transputer, for example, was mathematically proven correct, and cost $15 a chip. Given that a T400 was as powerful as an 80486, several years before Intel made any, it's pretty obvious cost isn't the reason.
(The transputer was a marvel, for its time - it was linearly scalable, regardless of number. 1000 of them would give you the same performance as a Cray 1, for 1% of the cost.)
The reason is complexity. Mathematical proofs aren't trivial, so few chip companies bother. It's simpler to ship defective goods, and hope nobody notices. Notice I'm saying "simpler", not "cheaper". Mathematicians aren't much more expensive than good VLSI engineers.
Why is simple important? Because of PR. If you can get a product out fast, or a new press release out fast, then that's Good Business. Taking your time to get it right doesn't fill newspaper columns. Nobody ever wrote an editorial on how so-and-so proved the ALU free of bugs. They =WILL= write plenty on Intel/whoever releasing the latest nth generation processor, even if their last release was the month before.
The cost of replacement is about the same as the cost of getting it right, but the PR life-cycle is much faster, and so gets more attention & higher stock value.
For those of you who have chosen "popular" over "quality" in any part of your life, you know the lure, even though you know the real price you'll pay in the end.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Unlikely. NASA deep space stuff is up around 8 GHz, where atmospheric effects are minimal. No, the thing is just too far away, and its signal just isn't strong enough.
What for?
In the present situation, it wouldn't make any difference. Goldstone et al are out in the middle of nowhere, and have no significant radio interference problems. The atmosphere isn't an issue at these frequencies.
If I wanted to build the Proverbial Really Big Radio Telescope I'd park it at a Lagrange point. No gravity at all to worry about, I could make it as big as I wanted, and in a vacuum I could have all sorts of fun making it out of improbable materials.
The main seelling point for a radio telescope on the Moon would be interferometry, providing a much longer baseline than any telescopes on Earth could muster. Until we set up shop on Mars...
...laura
They say it's currently about twice the distance from the sun as Pluto. I wonder how far it will get before.... we go and retrieve it. I read a book a while back, can't remember which one, but I'm pretty sure it was an Arthur C Clarke, possibly "3001". Anyway, in the story space travel has advanced to such a stage that craft can travel many orders of magnitude faster than the likes of Pioneer and Voyager. They decided that having primitive spacecraft travelling through space forever, possibly being picked up by other civilizations, was not a good thing. So they simply sent craft out, picked up the "trash" and brought it back. I wonder if this will ever happen. Arthur C. Clarke has made some very astute observations and even predicted technological advances such as geostationary satellites, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if we did retrieve these craft one day, albeit not in our lifetimes.
Ever hear of Apple? I have a Macintosh computer from about 1993 and it is capable of playing high-quality Mp3s and do things that my PC from that era can't even comprehend. Sure this isn't 20 years old but the application remains: Get a Mac and you won't have to replace it, atleast not as soon as a PC.
Would it be worthwhile for Nasa to put a few communications satellites capable of relaying around some of the more distant planets? Obviously the number and which ones would depend on where the planets were relative to earth and the objects you wanted to relay from.
They could be used for deep space probe communications or even for SETI-like stuff.
"Khaaaaaaaan!"
:-)
:-), but NASA is already backlogged on communication with probes, so Mars and Voyager would probably get priority.
Because of the signal distance, it was actually received as:
Kh&.aa.a#aaa.*n!
Then again, that is close to how Kirk used to talk anyhow
Here is an interesting snippet:
"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."
Pioneer 10 is getting near the expected border of the "heliosphere" (sp?) which is often considered the border of our solar system and interstellar space. It is the "spot" where the radiation pressure from interstellar space becomes stronger than the Sun's (due to the distance from the Sun).
Pioneer has also been used to inspect a very odd gravity anomally, also found in other probes. Nobody has found a way to account for it using known physics. It is a small force, but consitent. The anomally may relate to the mysterious "dark matter" which seems to be pulling on stars, but nobody knows what it is. Voyagers cannot also measure it for some reason which I never figured out. Something to do with its navigation adjustments/propellant being too complicated to factor out motion adjustments I think.
It was originally thought that the gravity anomally was due to the nuclear heat or radiation from Pioneer's power system "pushing" the probe. However, it drops over time, but the gravity difference does not fit that drop-off curve.
Too bad the signal is not strong enough to get good data for the next decade or so. They probably could if they put many *more* antenna's on the listening job (a beowulf cluster of antenna's?
Too bad they spend so much on ISS and get so little science when working probes at the edge of our system have to be ignored. Sigh.
Table-ized A.I.
At least the higher end hardware. My x86 Linux firewall has been running for a year and a half. We haven't had to reboot our SPARC20 since it was set up like 5 years ago. Granted 5 != 30, but I see no signs of it crapping out any time soon (jinx!). Also, bear in mind the pioneer 10 probably didn't do all that much in the way of computing. Perhaps it used processor intensive formula for calculations, but it wasn't running your Word processor, a web server, 20 browser windows, and most importantly it wasn't running Windows.
If you really want to extend the life of your boxen, just follow some simple rules.
-NO Overclocking.. no none.. at all..
-No Smoking around machines
-No crappy hardware (A crappy power supply can ruin all of your top of the line equipment)
-Don't let dust build up
-Provide sufficient cooling
-Keep away from Children and Windows Power Users.
Perhaps my view may be unpopular, but I think alot of hardware is made plenty sturdy still, and as long as we have companies that care about quality like 3com, Asus, and other leaders of the market, we will have the potential for cheap, reliable, high performance machines. And as long as we have companies that don't care about quality like D-link, Netgear, Soyo, and countless generic brands, we will have people whining about computers being unreliable.
But as far as I know, the Himalaya was a project from DEC. Compaq had no input to the project, they just aquired it with DEC and let the original engineers continue working on it.
Sigged!
They can, they have, and they will. The power source is available (provided you can pass the background check). It's called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator or RTG. Links follow, beware of wrap.
2 32 59.shtml?tid=126
x pl oration.and.Development.of.Space/Human.Space.Fligh t/Shuttle/Shuttle.Missions/Flight.031.STS-34/Galil eos.Power.Supply/RTG.Fact.Sheet
S pa ce%20Batteries.htm
http://nuclear.gov/space/space-desc.html
http://science.slashdot.org/science/02/10/28/17
http://spacelink.nasa.gov/NASA.Projects/Human.E
http://www.snakeriveralliance.org/PhotoGallery/
1) NASA's Deep Space Network is in shambles. It needs a massive upgrade.
2) A "Beowulf Cluster of Antennas" --Ever heard of the Very Large Array?
3) Pioneer uses a deliberately undermodulated form of PSK so that they could lock on to the carrier phase for reliable demodulation of the signal. I suspect the carrier was buried so far in to the noise that the sidebands were undetectable.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
"Pioneer has also been used to inspect a very odd gravity anomally, also found in other probes. Nobody has found a way to account for it using known physics. It is a small force, but consitent."
If anyone else wanted to know a little bit more what Tablizer was talking about here is some info on BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1332368.stm
I recently saw this article http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/05/21/gravity.m ystery/ from cnn on how both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 have not covered nearly the distance that conventional physics said they should have.
It seems that something is decelerating them both with equal force towards the sun.
"Something is slowing down the spacecraft. And we have not been successful in finding the source of that. There is more slowing than you would expect from Newtonian gravity," said John Anderson, a senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
This is somewhat of an old article, has anyone heard whether there has been an update on the cause of this?
-David
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The greatest question of all time is: "Are we alone?"
...and yes I know the dark side of the moon isn't always dark, but we'd want to cut down on earthshine too probably... ...and imagine a beo [smack
That's really the other ultimate goal of space exploration, isn't it? (The first goal is to find us a new place to live after the earth is used up).
But there is such a simple way to answer the question: Take all the cash we are using on rediculous stuff like the ISS and:
BUILD A GIANT TELESCOPE IN SPACE OR ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.
And I mean BIG.
One so Hugeomegagigantic that it can actually SEE the surface of extra solar earth sized planets in detail to pick out cities, roads, and lights.
And then, if we saw with our own eyes that there was another civilization -- imagine the space program we'd start to have then.
If the asteroid (or spacecraft) isn't too old, it outgasses, and the outgassing rate depends strongly on temperature, forming a weak natural rocket engine. Even for refractory materials (or old asteroids that have outgassed all that they are going to) the photon pressure from the warm side can have a significant effect over millions of years.
I haven't done the calculation myself, but I've discussed it over cocktails with Bill Bottke, a leading asteroid scientist, and he seemed to think it was a plausible explanation for the Pioneer 10 orbital drift. P10 is a spinner.
They talk about the fact that the 3 times that missions failed - the RTG units did not release any plutonium. They have changed the RTG heat source from plutonium metal to plutonium oxide.
Some things I would like to know:
1. how hot do these units get.
2. how much plutonium does it require per watt of power output.
3. how dangerous is the plutonium oxide to people
4. how safe is the plutonium oxide in terrestrial applications - applications where people would be in close proximity (a few meters) to the heat source.
is this a technology that (green party aside) could be applied locally to things such as vehicles, self powered compounds in the middle of no where (like if you bought a missle silo)
I imagine someone somewhere has examined whether the measured deceleration of the Pioneer probes might correspond with the predictions of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics)? This is an ad-hoc change to Newton's second law by Mordehai Milgrom, designed to explain the observed rotational motion of stars and galaxies without having to invoke dark (non-baryonic) matter. It does this surprisingly well, and it's main flaw is lack of a theoretical basis to date. Since MOND is different from traditional Newtonian dynamics only concerning "slow-moving" matter, Pioneer 10 might be an interesting test (or, it might just be too small - I'm not physicist enough to know :).
Anyone read anything on the subject? A quick google search doesn't turn much up.
I dunno. I don't think the price of a brand new Chevy Camaro Z-28, or a Ford Mustang Cobra (1977 prices) is trivial. I know I certainly wouldn't pay $24,000 - $38,000 on a new computer today, even if I had that kind of cash lying around to spend.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.