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NASA Gives Up On Pioneer 10
Soft writes "Another Energizer Bunny has finally given out: Pioneer 10's generators have decayed to the point that DSN can no longer detect the probe's signals. It was the first spacecraft to penetrate the asteroid belt (1972) and fly by Jupiter (1973). So long and thanks for all the pic's..."
No offense but if NASA's DSN network, the most advanced tracking and recieving facility in the world, cannot detect it why would you think 1000 amateur astronomers would have any luck? I pulled this from the Voyager home page but presumably Pioneer would be much weaker:
" The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level. "
Then again I am no radio expert so maybe what you describe is feasible.
pic of it: plaque
Pioneer 10's mission continues. Let's not forget the plaque that Pioneer 10 carries. It was world famous when the probe was launched, because it was mankind's first attempt to communicate beyond the solar system. Carl Sagan designed the plaque to be universally (in the truest sense) comprehensible, at least to any civilization sufficiently advanced to capture it. Next to the map of the probe's origin relative to our galaxy, with its key in binary notation, was an etching of a generic man and woman, superimposed on an outline of Pioneer to give a sense of scale. The man's arm was raised in a gesture that Sagan hoped would suggest friendship. Especially given the public's then-new awareness of threats to humanity's survival as a species, there was something very poignant about this cosmic message in a bottle that had no chance of being seen by anyone for millions of years.
I remember a newspaper cartoon from the day. A man in a business suit and a woman in a dress were looking at the plaque on Pioneer, which was half buried in the ground. The man said to the woman, "They seem very similar to us, except that they don't wear clothes."
Huh? The primary engineers in the early days were Germans, including former Nazis, many of whom built rockets for V-2 missle program. After the war just as many went to Russia as came here. They went to any country that had the resources to pursue a space program.
And there is no way you are going to tell me the space program was anything but politically motivated. It was a platform for Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to show up the Russians. Johnson particularly used it to keep the nations mind off Vietnam.
If anything, the lackluster movement of our space program can be attributed to a LACK of political motivation.
Failure is part of the process. The success of Pioneer's 3-11 came as a result of the failures of pioneer 0-2. The ones where they didn't "get it right"
It's also not like those engineers in the good old days never killed anybody. We've had three major disasters exploring space in 67, 86, and 03. All about 15 years apart or so. Not bad considering this is easily the toughest and most dangerous job in the world.