Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NASA Gives Up On Pioneer 10

Posted by michael on from the klingon-target-practice dept.

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..."

6 of 607 comments (clear)

  1. So long old friend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They just don't make 'em like they used to.

    1. Re:So long old friend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Note that the triumphs of NASA date from the era when engineers ran the programs, and not political hacks like now. I feel sorry for the young engineers now who will never experience the greatness which was NASA.

      There were no slackers then. There were dedicated young engineers with buzz cuts and and a slide rule. They didn't listen to "Hip Hop" or "Heavy Metal". They didn't wear baggy pants. They weren't interested in fashion or political correctness. Their uniform was a crisp white dress shirt, a string tie, and a pair of drip-dry Hagar slacks, accessorized with a leather holster--which held an 18 inch slide rule. Bang.

      These men were focused on quality and greatness. They were patriotic, dedicated men who strove each day to make America first with the best engineering the human mind could conceive.

      Today NASA is run by "professional" managers and bureaucrats. They cow-tow not to quality but to politically motivated "quotas" and false "diversity". Slackers abound. "Getting over" takes precedence over "getting it right".

      The saddest thing of all is not the failures of the current space program, as disturbing as they might be. The saddest thing is that we have lost the spirit and the system and methodology which yielded our greatest triumphs.

  2. Distance. by cybermace5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's 7.6 billion miles away. Almost 12 hours at the speed of light. And it will take two million years to reach a star considered to be in our close neighborood.

    Incomprehensible space...it's incredibly daunting, yet unbelievably appealing. Pioneer 10 was sent out in the same spirit as the pioneers of early America: the lure of seemingly boundless space and undiscovered wonders.

    This pioneer is blazing a trail we all hope to follow someday. Goodbye Pioneer 10, you have served us well.

    --
    ...
  3. Am I missing something here? by itallushrt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why don't all you people stop thanking a hunk of metal and start thanking the scientist and engineers that designed, built, and launched Pioneer 10. They are the real reasons this post even exist.

  4. Goddamn by cranos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You know you are truly geek when something like this almost brings tears to your eyes. I mean this thing had less computing power than your average calculator and yet it managed to be useful for thirty years?
    See what happens when you actually give your space programme decent funding? You do something like this, something which comes close to making the human race look like something more than six billion savages scrabbling in the dirt.

  5. Re:Wow! by kfg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It may well have been possible for you to have had a computer all of your life. Even the internet, nascent as it may have been, may well predate you.

    When he was born he had no *electricity* and no one in his family had ever seen an automobile. Geronimo had only been captured three years previously and was not only still alive, but a comparitively young man.

    The world he was born in to was one someone born 500 years before would have recongnized. The world you were born into is one that that hypothetical person couldn't possibly even have conceived of.

    You are talking differences in quantity. I am talking differences in quality.

    There is no essential difference in type or quality of life today than there was 40 years ago when I first entered school. We live the same way now, with mostly the same things, as we did then. Electricity, phones, central heating, planes, automobiles, movies, TV, hydrogen bombs, etc.

    The cars have become a bit more refined, the planes a bit faster, the phones cordless, the movies, well, they havn't changed much at all really. These are just the things we already had becoming better.

    I'm not saying we don't live in interesting times, or that I'm not glad to be here, but the two cases are *damned* different.

    By the way, the commercial sail record from Sandy Point N.J. at the entrance of NY harbor to Lands End England was only 11 days. It stood for 100 years.

    And I'm *damned* glad the internet hasn't come up with one single reason for me not to go to London. That would suck.

    KFG