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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..."
It is older than me by 14 years.
Any one have any really really good pics its taken?
I worry that we're leaving a trial of breadcrumbs for conquering alien races to find us. fight the future.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
So Long
So Long
I'm Sorry to See You Go
I'm So Sad You Are Gone
I Dearly Miss Your Feeble Little Signal
You May Be Gone
But You Are In My Heart Forever
My Tears Will Follow You Wherever You Go
Cleara
What is the approximate lifespan of the craft? Will the harsh environment of space eventually destroy it, or will it simply drift along forever? Unless of course it collides with something which I would think would be highly unlikely.
2 million years eh? Ok, here's a thought to ponder. Think some...thing from Earth will go get it before it gets to the next local star?
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Has SETI given up on it, too? I know they would do an informal test on their equipment by looking for the Pioneer 10 signal. SETI has been having problems tracking it for a few years at least... here's something Jill Tarter wrote about it.
If a nuclear war or asteroid or other event destroys all of humanity, probes like this will be our only legacy...
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
i wonder if it would be possible to use some the other satelites that us earthlings have out the the solar system to contact these probes when they get farther and farther away.
Imagine a chain of probes sent out in the same direction, all relaying information back to earth via one another. I wonder if any research has been done on the feasibility of such an approach...
OK Pioneer is dying from whatever I read it appears the problem is the signal to noise ratio is too low.
Perhaps all you amateurs with radio telescopes out there should ask NASA nicely (through whatever an organisation preferably) for the frequency and lcoation data that is not publicly available and do a big combined search.
Do you have procedures/software for doing VLBI? It would be a good project to do build it around if you do not already.
A few hours a day or days a month and you might still get some useful data from it.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
EchoStar and Bell should have gone with the guys that worked on that satellite... Check out how crappy modern satellites are (Lockheed Martin for example)... hell, they're in low earth orbit and they can't last a whole month before dying(LM's Nimiq 2)... Pioneer went through the asteroid belt... come on... Evolution means going forward, not back... Can't we build reliable satellites of yesteryear?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
From the info at Nasa's page on Pioneer 10 "A plaque was mounted on the spacecraft body with drawings depicting a man, a woman, and the location of the sun and the earth in our galaxy."
---..are really cool. Nuclear powered naval vessels don't last a third as long as Pioneer's radioactive batteries have.
You dont have a clue. A nuclear submarine has 1 battery compartment. This battery is your 50 gallon drum nuclear battery. Those types of batteries have a lifespan (in the submarine) of about 20 years. For that 20 years, it takes care of propulsion, air bladders, CO2 scrubbers, and the 90V AC (I cant remember the freq offhand).
For disposal, they seal these drums in bigger drums with the bottom of the bigger drum a lead/concrete mesh. They proceed to pour the similar mixture all around the barrel, sealing it totally. Then they lift it 2 miles down a hole in a mountain (Nevada). Once a floor is done, it's sealed by concrete and then a hatch is rivited and then soldered on.
For what it's worth, ALL the nuclear waste in the US would fit in the dimensions of the football field 6 feet deep. Compare that to COx, NOx, SOx and other organic crap floating from tailpipes. After what I've seen, nuclear is the safest fuel, given non-idiots tending the reactor. You've never heard of a US nuclear powered sub go critical and meltdown. You wonder why? They arent the dumbasses like 3MI. Island.
From somebody who knows a little too much.
Pioneer isn't dead as long as its moving and carrying that plaque as its one final message from us.
You know what I've always been looking for in the NASA site but could never get? Animated clips of its voyage (or that of Voyager's) and its fly-bys of the other planets. I always thought they would make really great looking screensavers to match my wallpapers of the shuttle. Anybody know where I can get them?
Keep on flyin Pioneer
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Im sorry where in my post did I say that Pioneer was the greated accomplishment mankind ever achieved?
Oh and by the way slavery has not been abolished in this world, neither has the issue of equal rights for women been dealt with properly. Smallpox is a great achievement, only problem is now it is being used to develop biological weapons, as is anthrax, botulism and and variety of little nasties.
When I posted I said the pioneer was an achievement that mankind can look on and say, "My (diety of choice) look where we have been, can we go further".
My interpretation of the article is that the probe briefly reached 82,000 mph during its closest approach to Jupiter. It slowed down considerably as it pulled away from Jupiter's gravity well. IIRC, it's currently moving at something more like 20,000 mph.
---Of course the dumbasses at 3MI don't control the media, nor can they "classify" information, or "disappear" witnesses.
That doesnt matter. Remember the russian vessal, Kursk? There was a group of people that knew what happened even before the Russians knew. Sesmologists. They heard a 4Hz 'ripple' at that time, from the explosion of that uh air going to the 'top'.
From their models, they knew something exploded. And if you know your geometry, all you need to know is 3 places for near perfect position. From what they gathered, something exploded in the ocean. That something was quite deep. Sub.
A nuclear explosion would be totally unhidable. There's nuclear detection sattelites that can detect minute traces of any sub-major explosion. Did you know, that in the mid 70's somebody blew a 2 Kton dirty bomb at the south pole? The US nor the Russians didnt know who did it. We thought it was some 3'rd world dictatorship (similar to Hussein or Kadafee). We still havent figured that one out.
From somebody who knows a little too much.
Are you going to be dead in 2020? The New Horizons project aims to launch a probe in 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt.
The Voyager 1 probe is more distant than Pioneer 10, and will probably expire within 20 years.
I only wish I were as elegant in wording as Carl Sagan:
Reflections on a Mote of Dust
We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness--there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
It's been said that Astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
You can see the image referred to in the article here .
(In all honesty, I believe this image was from Voyager, but Pioneer had the same view and I felt it only appropriate.)
Fare well, Pioneer.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
This blows me away, and for some reason, I seem to think of it a lot. Perhaps it's my technical nature, in awe at the speed of progress.
1903 was the first powered flight. 1957 was the first artificial satellite. 1969 was walking on the moon.
Only 67 years between two bicycle mechanics essentially playing with a kite to walking on the moon! That boggles the mind!
What most senior citizens in todays world have been witness to, I cannot even begin to grasp the number of times they must have been collectively blown away at some new advancement or achievement.
I just hope that we all are fortunate enough to be witness to the same progress and achievement.
I'll bite, you troll. How long have women and blacks had a chance in any of these fields? Thirty years or less? It's been three hundred or more years since the Enlightenment; I'm sure Newton wouldn't have accomplished what he did if he were born into slavery, or Einstein if he were never allowed to learn anything of substance. (And still, women were mathematicians.)
Twit. Oh hell, who am I kidding. The great early mathematicians who weren't Greek were Indian. Anyone remember Ramanujan? What about the scads of Asians in the field?
Sheesh.
I am saddened to hear that we lost contact with Pioneer 10 because we don't understand the forces acting on it. One would think that since we know gravity pretty well, and we know the relivant masses involved, we could predict the motion of the Pioneer satelites. Alas no. Exotic things like dark matter and photon pressure were invoked to explain the extra attraction (back) towards our sun, and failed. I heard a great talk about this while at U.C. Riverside department of Physics and had the chance to ask about photon pressure myself (yes, they take that into account - it is a far, far larger effect than this). The BBC has an old story on this effect, which I am sure many slashdotters have already heard of, here.
By the way, a similar anomoly is seen in Pioneer 11 and another distant satelite (Ulysses perhaps???).
Also, there is a link at nasa.gov, but at this time it seems broken. I include it for completeness here.
It seems John Anderson and friends have written several articles on this. One which you might find interesing has been published in Physical Review D: here.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
Troll alert:
Well, for one the first compiler was designed by a woman: Grace Hopper. If that is not a big contribution to the field of computing I don't know what it is.
African Americans have also had great impact in our society, wether you like it or not, and they are not just in the fields of humanities. And given the background of opression and lack of incentives that some of these people (minorities and women) had to endure just a few years ago, it is even more impressive.
BTW, what is your contribution to humanity TROLL?
One could imagine that we will see Pioneer 10 again. Within a century, I'm sure (or should I say 'I hope') we'll have craft capable of going much faster and further.
Quite a collector's item, eh? The 22nd Century equivalent of finding the Titanic. (Except that Pioneer 10 is an example of *good* engineering.)
A speech...
I have to disagree here. The best way is to get started and then improve your ship as you go. You will need generic manufacturing capabilities anyways (replacement parts), so why not build better engines?
You have to have the ability to manufacture anything that Earth can simply to stay alive during the trip, so all you then need are the plans/templates, which is simple communication.
So you start, improve your ship and speed up. No time wasted, and you still get there first.
Unless of course someone invents FTL, in which case, you can't get the plans before they show up and say "hi".
It's the same with hard computer problems. Sure, it may get faster later, but you start now and improve the hardware as you go. Don't assume a closed system!
Jason Pollock
No, but this page has some fascinating artist renditions (and *huge* publication size images), including Pioneer passing Jupiter, and the Pioneer looking back at the sun from Neptune's orbit!! Amazing! Nobody's ever seen *our* sun appear so small. (It's more dramatic in the medium-size picture.) It gives me goose bumps thinking what it would feel like to be out there, lost in the bleakness of space.
How about releasing it with all it's communication protocols, passwords, etc to the public domain. Who knows, there might be an enterprising young genius out there with an array of 120 foot (~40 meter) dishes. ;-)
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
If you look at history, the first voyages to the New World were all politically funded and motivated. Columbus sailed to the New World (actually it funded as a trip to find a quicker route to India and China) with ships and crew funded by Queen Isabella of Spain. Once gold was found, Spain sent ships and men to go get it (the fact that the gold belonged to someone else was a minor point to the Spanish). Once word of gold and land got out, other European nations started sending ships to the New World, funded by their Governments. Later, as new profit opportunities were found, Corporations (Hudson Trading Company) started getting involved.
The political agenda with space is nothing new. We are still at the stage where Politicans are funding space exploration. We are just beginning to see the beginning of Corporate interest -- mostly in satellites right now.
That said -- the main difference (other than technology and location) is we haven't (yet) found anyone out there. Pioneer 10 was a well built spacecraft that has given us (and the Gov't) much more than asked for. It has traveled over 11 light-minutes in 31 years before giving up the ghost, not bad for 1972 technology!
Beware of Sleestak
Pioneer had an interesting way of imaging. It did not really have a digital or TV camera like other probes did, but instead had a tube-like thingy that could point at only *one* narrow spot at a time, but could move back and forth. It used the *spin* of the probe to "scan" the target.
The closest visual analogy I can think of is a phonograph record. The needle can only move right-to-left, so it relies on the rotation of the record to bring the different "sound spots" into "view". IIRC, the probe rotated at something like 6 times per minute. The 1D "stream" of light intensity readings was then reconstructed into a 2D image back here on Earth.
Table-ized A.I.