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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."
"Khaaaaaaaan!"
sorry, I'll quit now.
The Pioneer 10 spacecraft was heard to whisper, "I can see my house!"
~ "When I'm of that age I'm just going to live up a tree."
Too bad they couldn't decode the message:
"Hey guys, Veeger's here, and she's pissed."
Kill Trolls Dead. Here's
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.
"Rosebud."
What could it mean? WHAT COULD IT MEAN?!
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
In space, all the craft needs to deal with is the occasional decresing chance of a cosmic or solar ray, or perhaps a micrometeorite. Earth's changing climactic conditions and microbes are far more destructive to technology than is space!
The space stuff is actually far too fragile to work on Earth, and is designed from a payload perspective to be light, not Earth-durable.
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?
I've got a working C-64 that's been through a dozen moves, an infinite number of Jumpman inspired rages, and two boys' adolescensce. Space? Hah!
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
...and still being productive. What is your excuse?
You raise a child, send them off, and they don't even call home that often, and when they do, they can't even understand them...
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?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
It must be a man, it waited this long to ask for directions...and then it had to whisper.
From the Pioneer Status web page:
Pioneer 10 distance from Sun : 81.86 AU Speed relative to the Sun: 12.228km/sec (27,355 mph) Distance from Earth: 12.10 billion kilometers (7.52 billion miles) Round-trip Light Time: 22 hours 25 minutes
There was one more Pioneer 10 contact on 12/5/02. The Deep Space Station (DSS) near Madrid (DSS-63) found the signal but could not lock onto the receiver, and so no telemetry was received. The signal level was just under the threshold value. The uplink from DSS-14 at Goldstone, sent 12/4/02 at a power level of 325 kw, confirmed that the spacecraft signal is still there (Round Trip Light Time = 22 hr 24 min).
Project Phoenix also picked up the signal from Pioneer 10 at Arecibo in Puerto Rico.
LARRY LASHER, PIONEER PROJECT MANAGER
(Copyright NASA)
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.
How to Download YouTube Videos
send out another multi-million dollar spacecraft out toward Pioneer 10 that will send a signal yelling "WHAT????"
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.
"Now if only computer manufacturers could make equipment even remotely this sturdy."
It's called the Compaq Nonstop Himalaya. Each processor runs every calculation twice, in parallel, and compares the answers when done--if they do not match, it tries again. If they do not match again, the processor state is saved then restored in one of the "hotspare" processors. The memory uses a special, extra high-reliability (and extra slow) ECC algorithm. The server itself has integrated battery backup, variable speed fans which adjust for the death of other fans, and each system is immensely expandable without ever being rebooted or shut down.
An acquaintance of mine works for a company which has a Nonstop with an uptime of nearly ten years.
Remember the Tandem?
Note that the Nonstop isn't much more reliable than IBM's Z series mainframes, which basically never die either.
Ironic, isn't it, that a company famous for making desktops which are essentially crap, makes one of the most reliable servers on earth?
Er, back on topic, isn't Voyager significantly farther from the sun than Pioneer 10?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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
"Can you hear me now?"
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
I'm sure that you can get almost anything you like as sturdy as Pioneer 10 if you're prepared to spend $300 million on getting it built...
(Pioneer 10 cost $75 million in the 1970s - which corresponds to something like $300 million today.)
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.
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.
(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?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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...
"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)
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
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
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!
C'mon, it's been out there for 30 years;
It must have bumped into the big black wall with starts painted on it by now.
I sense a disturbance in the force...millions of Slashdot "comedians" all crying out with bad jokes and ill puns and then silenced.
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
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.
I seem to recall reading that Earth outshines the sun in certain radio bands. Citation lost to the mists of time.
You could beamcast signals to another star easily enough, especially with a (very large) space-based dish. The problem is aperture size, not source power per se (you want the beam to have low divergence). While optical transmission doesn't require as large a dish for a given divergence, it does require far more energy to be detectable. You have to be bright enough to put a minimum of about 10 photons per $sample_period per $detector_area at the destination star system to be detected, and visible photons are many orders of magnitude more energetic. (I'm assuming we're doing detection by correlating many samples, instead of trying to dump enough energy to outshine the Sun in one pulse).
Broadcasting instead of beamcasting, we'd need vastly more power to be detectable at all.
Ba-dump-pish
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"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.
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.
There is an interesting (older) article linked from this one regarding the fact that both Pioneer probes (10 and 11) are closer than they should be based on the laws of gravity and Newtonian physics. JPL scientists postulate the existence of some sort of "hyper-gravity", as the effect has been shown equivalent on both probes, although each was sent in opposite directions.
//Nanoox
It would be interesting to find out whether this effect has also been observed on the Voyager probe which surpassed both Pioneer probes as the most distant man-made object in 1998.
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.
I worked for 10 years in a facility that built custom ICs for NASA. Most of the ICs in almost every historic space mission was produced by this facility. When I was there we used a lot of 6805 varients. They were NOT the same parts that you could buy off the shelf. First, the die we started with was processsed specificly for the application. Second the construction techniques are far different then commercial parts. Third, we screened the *** out of them, as in start with 40 parts for a deliverable of 4 units. The StrongArm is a industrial device to begin with. It is not a commercial grade part. Industrial grade ICs are already part of the way there, to level S.
Any ways, the real killer for space craft, besides being able to survive launch, is temperature. It is not just the extreams, NASA parts work from -55c to +125c, it is the tempurature cycling. Tempurature cycling stresses wirebonds, package seals, and even the integrety of the substrate. Temp cycling can even drive out chemically bound water that can react with ionic contaminates to produce corrosives. This can degrade bond wires, the substrate metalization, and on one occasion, a resistor on the die itself.
Building a spacecraft from parts from Radio Shack is like fighting a modern navel battle with bass boats. Though a bass boat and a destroyer both float, have GPS, radios, radar, and sonar, there is a lot of differents in construction. I'd but my money on the destroyer.
Imagine, please, that you have a pipe 1m in diameter stretching from just past Earth's atmosphere to the Alpha Centauri system. (Ignore the engineering difficulties, please.)
Can you guess how much all the contents of that pipe would weigh?
Less than a kilogram.
Considerably less than a kilogram.
I would tell you just how tiny, but you wouldn't believe me. I'll let you do the math: the observed density of the universe is 2.1 * 10**-29 kilograms per cubic meter. From here to Alpha Centauri is about 4.5 lightyears, and each lightyear is 9.5 * 10**15 meters.
So we're looking at a total distance of about 4*10**16m to Alpha Centauri. Multiply that by the cross-sectional area of our pipe (.6m) and you get... 2.4 * 10**16m**3 of volume.
Multiply that by the observed density of the universe and you get...
5 * 10**-13 kilograms.
Yeah. Like I said. Considerably less than a kilogram.
Your post shows a severe lack of understanding about space. One, it's freaking cold. Two, once you get past Saturn you can pretty much write off solar flares and activity. Three, sure, there are energetic cosmic rays--but they're here on Earth, too, so Earth's no better off. (No, our atmosphere doesn't protect us in any substantial way from cosmic rays.)
If you were to stand on Pluto and turn on a cell phone, the radio signal from your cell phone would be the brightest electromagnetic signal in the sky--by orders of magnitude.
Space is overwhelmingly small, dark and quiet. Yes, there is the occasional bit of matter which can be a real royal pain in the ass... but the odds of a collision are, well, astronomical.
I don't think you understand a damn word of what you just posted, and it astonishes me that you can get a +4 moderation for being totally flipping wrong.