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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's tired of hearing about Linux kernel releases every ten minutes.
It makes me feel old to know that I was alive when this thing launched!
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
But I won't believe Pioneer 10 is dying until Netcraft confirms it..
Trolling is a art,
They just don't make 'em like they used to.
It is older than me by 14 years.
Any one have any really really good pics its taken?
Pioneer 10, and other satellites of that era, worked far beyond what they were intended, and did a darn good job (and then some) at what they did. Pioneer 10, you did good. May you rest in peace. A job well done.
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 and thanks for all the fish :-)
Just because we can't hear its signals doesn't mean THEY don't. /me
looks forward to the return of P'neer.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...the Klingon bird of prey decloak, DUCK!
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
There is another article on the news.com.au site in case the first goes down.
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside" -- Calvin
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
A little spacecraft
Far away among the stars
Rest well, Pioneer
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This is the second major deep space probe in the last few months that has gone south. Sad, because Pioneer 10 was the one that paved the way for so many other missions (like the Voyager Missions).
Here's to a long and steady life to the remaining deep space missions out there.
So, it's just dying out there? And what about our other "deep-space" probes? Yep, on the death bed.
So, using rice_web's ingenious stupidity, I've come up with:
(1) Send a new probe to follow our dying probes and act as a relay for the information.
(2) Just completely start over and get new probes up and running, and moving more quickly than our dying probes.
The Political Programmer
Watch, in 5 years, someone will hear from it again.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
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.
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.
...
I still think it's amazing that these things lasted this long, whereas modern probes often don't even accomplish the mission before failing, let alone lasting 30 years. They just don't make 'em like they used to
She sure was a good ship.
Farewell, Pioneer. And we thank you.
-Mr. Fusion
The first thing I thought of was Deep Space Nine. And I thought... My God, that thing has traveled far!
If/when technology permits, we should make it a point to send a ship to retrieve the probe, for both practical and symbolic reasons. It'd be interesting to see the ware and tare on a craft that's been through so much as it has; and, it has a great historical value. As a sign of respect to itself and its builders, Pioneer deserves to be in a measeum of sorts.
Of course, my other half tells me, for the same reasons, let it alone, in space, quietly, where its home is.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
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
Not a bad try, better man sed though, you missed a couple. ;)
Trolling is a art,
...are really cool. Nuclear powered naval vessels don't last a third as long as Pioneer's radioactive batteries have.
It would be great if we could roll radioactive waste into similar devices to power cars, remote buildings, or even laptops--if we could effectively shield the power source with a small light enclosure.
I just detected that probe the other day... wait... perhaps that was a different kind of probe. Never mind then.
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...
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Pioneer community when NASA confirmed that Pioneer 10's signal strength had dropped yet again. Coming on the heels of a recent NASA commnications attempt which plainly states that Pioneer 10 has lost all communication with home, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along, Pioneer 10 is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by being completely unable to send a receivable signal in the last NASA communications attempt.
Did anyone else read that and think of the Verizon Wireless commercials?
"Can you hear me NOW?!?"
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
..2 million years to Aldeberon?
Maybe our decendents x 100,000 (assuming 20 yrs/generation) will recover it...
One can only hope....
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.
Man, you know its having trouble when even the advanced sensors on Deep Space Nine cannot detect its signal.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio this morning. It seems that space probe Pioneer 10 was found dead in its distant space home this morning. Even if you didn't enjoy its photos of our planets, there's no denying its contribution to astronomy. Truly an engineering icon.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
They're only coming to serve man.
KFG
2 million years eh?
Just time for another bath! Pass me the sponge, would you?
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
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.
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.
... in a nice curry sauce with some decent wine!
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of 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."
Pah! That's not so special. My car is over 30 years old and it's still going. OK, the mileage is not as high but Pioneer 10 didn't have to worry about corrosion. In space, nobody can hear you rust.
Might be a good idea for future missions, but more than likely its batteries finaly died or couldn't produce enough current to thaw out the transmitter array, so I doubt it could leave a signal trail. But the staggered launch on the same vector would be a great idea for future series. Imagine a transmitter followed by a train of repeaters launched on the same vector every year.
Is there a "radio" hubble or one in planing that tries to duplicate the hubble's mission of getting to orbit to try and avoid earthbound interference. Imagine a listening array on the far side of the moon to try and listen in on even fainter signals than we can pick up with the VLA or Aracebio[sp]
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Netcraft comfirms it.
(you can shoot me now)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Yeah, it should be its pics.
There, no nasty apostrophes implying possession here.
KFG
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! No, make the pain stop! You are causing me a Battlefield Earth flashback! Not only did I watch that evil movie, I've read the damned book years before.
Don't you know that's exactly how Psychlo's found Earth in the first place?
Can I believe that I actually know that? Please, shoot me now before the Hubbard cultists get me!
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I knew space probes travelled fast, but 82,000 mph !!! Could we get a ship with people in it going that fast??? Of course at that speed I imagine that when it eventually was hit by the smallest spec of space dust the ship would be toast. Then again, Pioneer 10 made it 82 AU alright.
Asside from a few projects designed to beam high-energy signals at spesific stars, most of the radio waves we send out will be so weak that they would never be able to be detected against background nose just a few lightyears away.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
a Jorb Well Done?
I lived through most of that. I saw man walk on the moon when I was 4 years old. I can remember it barely. My older brother who was 10 years old was trying to take poloraid pictures of the TV. Somewhere in my basement I still have them. When I was a kid I thought that we would be on Mars by 2000. Now I seriously wonder if we(the US) will get to Mars or even back to the Moon in my lifetime. China will get to the Moon in the next 5-10 years and maybe that will wake us up.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
these probes follow a 'path' through the solar system, slinging their way from jupeter/satern/etc. If we sent another probe in 5 years, it wouldn't be able to follow the same path, as the planets would be in diffrent places.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Most of us will never again see anything like this. Neither the last communication of a space probe like this nor another space probe at the edge of our solarsystem. Will we make more? Probably. Will we see the edge of the solarsystem again? 30 years is a long time, most of us will be dead in 30 years.
The Voyager probes were sent out with a gold disc which contains, amongst other things, greetings from Kurt Waldheim (former Secretary-General of the UN) amongst ones in a bunch of languages, the "sounds of Earth", including Beethoven and Chuck Berry, the sound of waves against the shore, and various other things, and a bunch of images of Earth life, as well as some instructions as to how to play the disc. It was Carl Sagan's project, IIRC.
Of course, the odds of the probes ever being detected by extra-terrestrial intelligence is virtually zero, given their slow speed, tiny size, and the fact that they don't emit any signals (or more precisely won't by the time ET is in a position to spot them).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It would certainly be nice to. However, aside from the obvious funding differences(adjusted, of course) the newer satellites are also built differently... much like buildings erected hundreds of years ago were built differently than modern buildings. The farther back you go, the less sophisticated the buildings tended to be. The buildings built to last back then were done through brute force.(much, I'd imagine, like Pioneer 10 versus more contemporary satellites)
More effort, but more consistant results.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
When Columbia failed it was bad for the government to run space programs.
When Pioneer works its is a testiment to NASA and shows how crappy the private sector can be.
So which is it? NASA bad or Private Sector bad?
the effort and expenditure of resources to get from there to here would probably mean the payoff for attacking us wouldn't be worth the trip.
My friend, you seem to be forgetting our vast amounts of stable Energon!
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
No, it didn't play Bach. Voyager probes have a disc on them which features, amongst other things, excerpts of classical music (I assume there's some Bach on there), but not Pioneer.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
that's the closest i've been to a woman in a while
Netcraft confirms it.
dfenstrate is dying.
*looks down*
Er, make that dead.
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."
Either something will have gotten there, or nothing ever will. By two million years from now, humanity will have either destroyed itself or achieved the Singularity.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It really says: Get your free porn here!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Incidentally, they were going to put a Beatles song on there but the Beatles' record company refused permission...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Of course, my other half tells me, for the same reasons, let it alone, in space, quietly, where its home is.
Do both! Build a "space museum" around it that is traveling at the same speed and people can come and visit and watch it just hang there in the middle of the moving museum.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Just jump in the hyperdrive and go grab it and download it.
We do have hyperdrive, right?
I mean, it's 2003.
We were supposed to be mining Jupiter's moons by now.
We can't go get one little probe?
What have we been doing with the last 30 years?
Hell of a track record for what was intended to be a 21-month mission, eh?
anonymous... good choice.
-pyrrho
Kurzweil didn't start this; he has his own take on the Singularity thing which is a subtle but important departure from Vinge's vision. Kurzweil sees humanity as being empowered and enlightned by the Singularity; Vinge sees it as being replaced.
But hey, nothing like an insta-attack on someone who I wasn't even referencing...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How sad, and last year CNN just had an article about how it got a new lease on life! Also see this link for the picture it carries of us...
On the other hand, think of the social change that people in my parents' generation accomplished from 1960 to 1980. Civil rights, the second wave of feminism, gay people being able to live openly, safe and legal abortion. These aren't little things, especially when you consider what happened between 1980 and 2000---not much, especially compared to the previous two decades.
I really think that Reagan's election in 1980 and the rise of the Religious Right was the death knell for the will to change that had marked the nation for those twenty years. I wasn't there, but it stands out as a turning point when you look at it.
Anyone who was actually there want to fill me in?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
One of the Pioneer 10's missions (that will continue indefinitely) is to introduce ourselves to other life forms. The famous plaque onboard describes where things about the Earth, our galaxy, human beings, etc. We don't need to maintain radio contact for that 1-way communication to continue.
Assuming we haven't yet been contacted by another form of life, why would you terminate that wonderful mission prematurely?
The Pioneer 10 was designed to still have a valid function once radio contact was lost. Out of respect for its builders (and Carl Sagan, at the very least), its mission should continue.
Look dude the guy is right on. When they built stuff in the 50's and 60's they built them tough
and reliable. the word "overbuilt" was not in thier vocabuary. The sr71 was the fastest thing in
the sky and if you discount missiles it still is unless perhaps the aurora is operational.
the b52 is still in use for basicly the same mission it had in the 50's. Parts still fall off commercial airliners less than half the 52's age.
THEY WENT TO THE FUCKING MOON AND BACK WITH SLIDE RULES! Damn your a fucking troll!
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.
Think some...thing from Earth will go get it before it gets to the next local star?
You're darn right someone will! Just imagine what it would go for on eBay!!!
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
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?
I'm sad. I feel sorry for the poor little thing, all alone in the dark forever. No one to talk to anymore. :-(
Maybe it will end up like V...ger.
I hope they included some human DNA.
Perhaps it will enter the atmosphere of another planet and that DNA will give rise to a new form of life, or perhaps some intelligent being will find it and use it to recreate human life elsewhere in the universe..
Bye bye little guy....
You could send a probe every 12 years when Jupiter is in the same place in it's orbit. You could also send them more often in a spiral as Jupiter went around.
I guess the point is that to go to deep space you only need one planet so you have a lot more flexibility. And if you did need a multiple planets, it's still only the vector from the final planet that has to be the same.
-pyrrho
its kinda sad to think how its dying..alone, cold, and its energy slowly fading away..
rest in peace Pioneer, you sure were.
Dont ask me, im just the bass player!
Please, shoot me now before the Hubbard cultists get me!
our chance has been and gone unfortunately. shouldnt be too long for it to come around again tho, so just sit tight till then. dont worry, we'll contact you.
Dont ask me, im just the bass player!
...an old geeky guy picks up his Coke, brushes the pizza crumbs off his gut, brushes spider web out of his waist length greasy hair, pushes his chair back and says "OK, who's gonna beat THIS uptime?"
kinda funny how kirk ...erm I mean picard experienced a lifetime through something a bit more advanced than pioneer, yet along the same concept.... you think maybe, just maybe it was one of the original intents in sending V'yger in the first place?.... oooh spooky ... seeing as how brinkmanship was much larger and in peoples minds much more back then...
Voyager, not Pioneer, took a "Golden Record" with encoded images, spoken greetings in dozens of languages, a variety of natural and human sounds, and an anthology of music from around the world, including both classical (e.g. Bach) and popular (e.g. Chuck Berry) selections.
The record is 12 inches in diameter and plays at 16 2/3 r.p.m. The long-playing record of the day played at 33 1/3 r.p.m., but Carl Sagan's committee had the foresight to predict that advanced extraterrestrials would get double the music by playing their LPs at half the speed.
Just kidding. Sagan's committee included instructions for playing the record, and even a phonograph needle cartridge. I hope the species that finds it has ears.
No.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Jesus!
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
I know they have. The problem is, that "impact" hasn't necessarily been positive. Whether you like it or not.
As opposed to all the positive impact by white guys like Hitler and Stalin and their organisations, that also didn't have women or blacks.
Sorry, I have I just knocked your idols?
Mant
So long and thanks for all the pic's...
This Pioneer 10 is not dead - it is resting.
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)
The last thing we want is a rerun of ST:TMP.
See my journal, I write things there
and you know that's the truth.
Somebody should design and launch a probe with the sole purpose of seeing how far it can get and how long we can communicate with it. No (other) on board experiments, no camera. Just a beacon and a propulsion system. A big fat RTG with a freakishly huge antena. It might even be useful for space navigation since it should travel in the same direction for a damned long time. Just a thought.
We really need your help
http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry
oo..You mean a Nintendo Entertainment System? Me too! We're like brothers! ;)
--- What
Nothing, I was IRCing..
--- What
I mean this thing had less computing power than your average calculator and yet it managed to be useful for thirty years?
And this is something we tend to lose sight of, we've become so conditioned to believe that something somehow becomes less capable than it originally was as time passes.
A screwdriver today will still do the job it did 100 years ago.
So is this going to mean there'll be a big war between V'ger and P'ner?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
by a wonderful metal band called "Warlord"...partial lyrics are below:
Through Pioneer 10 and Voyager 1
We've launched our knowledge to other suns
Aspiring and reaching for the highest of beings
We've lost our search for the world's basic needs
The Aliens - inside our machines! The Aliens - inside our dreams!
The Aliens . . . The Aliens, The Aliens are here!
Through fiction and lies we gaze at the skies
For flying saucers and men with three eyes
Creating those monsters we seek to destroy
Like children at play smashing their toys!
The Aliens - controlling our spheres! The Aliens - so far yet so near!
The Aliens . . . The Aliens, The Aliens are here!
All myths of men and gods will apply
when sanity and reason begin to die
the dragons you've denied and wish to slay
may rise to conquer us all someday!
the aliens - the message is clear!
the aliens - the aliens are here
One of the only tunes I know that mention the great Pioneer 10 by name. It will be missed.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
it's currently moving at something more like 20,000 mph.
And somewhere in space, some asshole in a VW Beetle is honking at it to pass.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Coolest thing about the plaque is the illustration with the numbers 4 and 5 on it-- the position of the sun with respect to nearby pulsars and the center of the galaxy.
:) I would even venture to say that it is the same illustration that is on the plaque but I can't confirm this- can anyone else?
You can see this illustration (or something very similar) for yourself by firing up Celestia, turning "draw constellations" on, then setting your orientation to earth or sun and zooming out to galaxy level or so-- Cool eh? It draws lines from each of the constellations to the center of the view and looks strikingly similar to the plaque's illustration
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
"The Dish" is a good techie movie. Its mostly right on its facts and there isn't any technobabble.
What happened in the movie (and real life) was that the 210 ft dish (aka radio telescope) wasn't pointing at the correct spot. The reason they can't hear pioneer is that the signal is so weak that it can't be picked up with most sensitive recievers ever built. The gear that they are using to find pioneer's singal could pick up an Apollo 11 type signal without much effort at all.
What about the programmer Lady Ada Lovelace
(as in the programming language that Ada was named after her)
G.
Hello? Can you hear me now?
From the article:
I imagine weekend trips to see the old "spaceship still crawling towards Aldebaran" being available in a few hundred years to our (grand-)children...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think this is an interesting question - 'cause frankly it seems like they DON'T make them like they used to. Is Pioneer a fluke, like the odd VW Rabbit that racks up 350,000 miles? Or was there something special about the technology, team, design, and/or construction effort that we could really learn from in designing DEEP space probes... the kind DESIGNED to last decades... even centuries? (I honestly don't know the answer. Any input from space geeks?)
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I keep forgetting that people here need smileys.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Dudnt people see that star trek movie?
I don't usually beat the racial or sex horses but that comment was absurd. I'm also not at all for affirmative action and think it has watered down the core of people in many important fields, but I just can't believe that someone could say that women and african americans haven't contributed to humanity, crazy talk for sure.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Just wrote an article on this at SFT, with links to video clips of the launch and Carl Sagan discussing the significance of the gold plaque.
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
Fucking troll. I can come up with three off the top of my head.
How about George Washington Carver, who revolutionized agriculture by improving crop yields and finding the first non-food/clothing applications for plant products, as well as introducing plastics into automobile manufacturing and starting the development of the first synthetic rubber?
Or Lewis Latimer, of Thomas Edison's research team, who literally wrote the book on electric lighting (Incandescent Electric Lighting, 1890) and invented the threaded light bulb socket?
Last, but by no means least, there's Marie Curie. If I have to explain her importance to you, you shouldn't be reading Slashdot.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
"Send more Chuck Berry!"
-- Boycott Shell
I never would have thought I would be the one pointing out something that could be positively interpreted for Intel but as it happens Pioneer 10 was powered by the Intel 4004.0 04.html / 20 011115corp_a.htm
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/epc/4
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases
/J - to know recursion you must first know recursion
FYI - the "Sun from beyond Neptune" was entirely conceived by Carl Sagan. He wanted this to show Humanity's place in the cosmos (why we quabble over such small problems, etc) and that's why he called his "sequel" to Cosmos Pale Blue Dot.
It is not in orbit around anything.
Technically, it's still in orbit around the center of the Milky Way, isn't it?
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
I'm no physics major, but in space, since there's no friction, shouldn't P10's 82k mph speed continue at 82k until something physically stops it (inertia anyone?). Obviously I'm wrong here, so can someone steer me in the right direction?
It would also violate a couple of other laws. This is the last straw. We need to force Congress to repeal the law of relativity now. Maybe we should do something about the DMCA as well.
When I grow up I want to be a quantum mechanic!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Then use this dish to communicate with probes like Pioneer 10, or others we might launch with much faster propulsion systems, where the Earth's atmosphere would just muddle the signal too much. Utilize a nearby relay station like ISS to rebroadcast the signal.
Even if the ISS couldn't be used, for what I'm sure are a multitude of reasons (I'm not an astrophysicist and don't claim to be), all a dish or array of dishes really need are a big base to attach to, with some corrective thrust ability and control systems, and a power source. Wouldn't really even need to be manned, though it should be accessable by a shuttle or the transport of choice that year.
This could just be a pipe dream ... but look at what the Hubble did for space imagery, by taking the interference of the atmosphere out of the equation. I suspect a space-borne orbiting deep-space communications platform would benefit us immensely, and probably allow much more complex probe missions in the future.
What about attaching a big DSN, i.e. an array of antennas, at various points around the moon? That's a nice big base already in Earth orbit, far enough away to be relatively clean of our interference, easy to find for location purposes and handily made of rock - good stuff to attach say radio tower pieces to.
Afraid the Berzerkers are coming? It's far too late to do anything about it now.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
... urge to... anthropromorphize... space probe!
What's the point? Us humans have a hard enough time trying to read 5yr old DAT tape half the time!
Great. Aliens are going to find that disc and will have to travel billions of miles just to find a Radio Shack.
I know. It was a bit of a private joke I'm afraid. :)
KFG
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.
they landed a RC car on mars and drove it around you idiot.
AND they were always a political organization at the top, the engineers were merely the best... guess what? They still ARE!
Why anonymous?
-pyrrho
like i said /craters caused by impacts with space debrie.
:)
mind you i would like to see it up close and smell the 'burned' steel smell that comes from metals explosed to space, not to mention any pits
but then so would other people
hence eBay
so, where did I steal that from?
(I've heard "I'm a quantum mechanic" before... but I don't recall where, and I was ripping off that term consciously with "orbital mechanic")
-pyrrho
Ugh. The colonizer's model of the world strikes again. There were people in America before the disease ridden, mass murdering Europeans showed up! Cahokia was a large city until smallpox swept across the continent after Spanish contact. When everyone else showed up in later years, it seemed empty because the only people left were the descendents of the folks who surived being the earlier plagues. Yes, the archaeological evidence exists. I'd have to take you there though ...
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Spare a single mod point for the parent, if you will.
- Chris
The space-probes will be all that is left to prove that mankind ever existed.
Substitute "Eva" for "space-probes" in the sentence above...cool huh. Fuyutski and Yui were right!
w00t! Astrodroids.
Re:am I the only one (Score:5) by Blondie-Wan (559212) on 10:09 PM February 25th, 2003 (#5384357) ( http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/ ) If that were a concern, the constant stream of radio, TV and other telecommunications signals we've been pumping into space for most of the 20th century would be a far bigger problem. There's effectively a big sphere of signals expanding around Earth in all directions at the speed of light, and anyone in space who chanced to stumble across any of our physical probes like Pioneer 10 would most likely have already detected us long, long before. Earth really calls a lot of attention to itself with its broadcasts, and our signals just get stronger and more blanketing as time goes by. Not only that, but even if we stopped all broadcasts tomorrow, there'd still be all our old signals moving out through space, and anyone out there with the wherewithal to detect them would be have several of our earth decades of opportunity in which to do so. Moreover, many think it's profoundly unlikely any alien races would be interested in conquering us. Even assuming others out there are hostile, the effort and expenditure of resources to get from there to here would probably mean the payoff for attacking us wouldn't be worth the trip. It's also been argued that any extraterrestrial civilizations capable of detecting us will almost certainly be much older and more advanced (the thinking being that on the cosmic timescale, we're just starting off, and any civilization even a little younger than ours wouldn't have the tech to detect us, and the odds are high against another civ reaching this stage of development against the exact same time we do, so if they can hear us they've probably been around a while),
I disagree with this. The universe is a large place. I mean an incomprehensiabley large plave. There are places out there that have plenty of time to go from biological soup to intelligent socity more advanced than we are today, and then die out, starting tommorow, before the signals we have broadcast their direction arrive! Think of it, radio wave travel fast, and evolution is slow, yet the turtle of evolution has time to start from scratch, create something better than us, and kill them off, before our rabbit radio waves can get to them, even though the rabbit got a head start and won't take a nap.
Of course when you get that far out, odds are even a signal aimed directly at them will be too faint to detect.
We crawled from the muck on malformed fins and sucked hot air into barely functional lungs. Preyed upon by the greater beasts of the land, we sought solace in the trees. Gradually we developed intelligence and tools, and we became the hunters. We tamed the wild grasses and settled together, forming the first civilization. Through centuries of toil we have made art, science, mathematics, and endless perseverence our tools and our allies. And now, millions of years after we first set out on our voyage, we are slowly setting out to escape the bonds of Earth. We are reaching up, and with outstretched hands, touching the face of God.
I know that we all ache in our hearts for everything that NASA has not been able to do these last forty years. Don't ever forget, however, all the incredible things that have been done. Cheers, to everyone at NASA, and to all mankind.
~SL
Respect to the engineers behind the Pioneer hardware and software. Truly "doing more with less" legends.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Putting an apostrophe in "pics" is incorrect. As a general rule, people overuse apostrophes....
---- Live for Music. Die for Trance.
Four responses, three trolls (mostly incompetent) and one actual response. What a shitty SNR.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You guys should go check out JPL's website.There are some great tutorials on this subject.
From JPL online course in orbital mechanics
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"Chapter 1 pointed out that the planets retain most of the solar system's angular momentum. This momentum can be tapped to accelerate spacecraft on so-called "gravity-assist" trajectories. It is commonly stated in the news media that spacecraft such as Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini use a planet's gravity during a flyby to slingshot it farther into space. How does this work? By using gravity to tap into the planet's tremendous angular momentum."
If the spacecraft was only moving 20,000 MPH it could not exit the solar system, that's even slower than earth's escape velocity.
What always blew my mind was how accurately the nav guys could can get the speed and position of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. It was like shooting a freethrow from 3000 miles and swishing it with no mid course corrections.
best regards,
buck
Waffle Iron said:
> It's like a roller coaster with Jupiter creating a big dip in the track. The probe goes
> fastest at the bottom of the dip, but returns to its original speed after it climbs out.
Sorry, but that would only be true if the planet wasn't moving.
It's actually more like playing crack the whip on ice skates. The planet's huge angular momentum transfers an incredible amouut of energy to the little spacecraft and it leaves way faster than the speed it was moving before the encounter.
best regards,
buck
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"Pioneer 10 called home for over thirty years of spaceflight.
Its future is now transferred from NASA to Isaac Newton and
Johannes Kepler, neither of whom could be reached for comment"
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-- James Van Allen