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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
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.
...
She sure was a good ship.
Farewell, Pioneer. And we thank you.
-Mr. Fusion
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
I just detected that probe the other day... wait... perhaps that was a different kind of probe. Never mind then.
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
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.
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.
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."
Netcraft comfirms it.
(you can shoot me now)
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
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'
Possible, kind of, but not really.
NASA is researching the possibility of setting up a network of satellites around the solar system that can relay information.
Mars, infact, has 2 relay satellites (MGS and ODY) in orbit that can relay information from rovers/landers/etc from the ground. More will be entering orbit still (ESA's, and another mars orbiter for 2005 or 2007 i think). They will all have the ability to relay information. The beagle lander will rely on this, for example.
But there is a problem. Those satellites can only relay signals from mars (in orbit, or on the ground). They cannot pick up a signal from Jupiter or Saturn, and retransmit it to earth because they do NOT have a reciever big enough to do that.
NASA's DSN (look it up) has 100 foot dish antennas to pick up signals from the outter solar system.
You CANNOT fit a 100 foot dish to a satellite and orbit it around Mars or Jupiter, etc, to pick up signals from further out and relay them to earth. Its simply not possible.
Because of this, spaceprobes can only relay signals to Earth from signals which are near by. Hence, MGS or ODY relaying from landers on he surface of mars, or Cassini relaying data from the huygens probe.
Cassini can't pick up signals from a probe around Nepture or Uranus and relay it to earth, because it just cannot possibly have a powerful enough reciever since that requires a huge dish.
One option, however, is to use laser (optical) instead of radio transmission, which may make this possible.
That may still have many other problems of its own, however.
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
---..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.
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.
The Pioneer 10 & 11 spacecraft used Pu-238 RTGs. The generators initialially provided 155 watts, which diminished to 140 watts by the time the spacecraft encountered Jupiter, 100 watts five years into the mission.
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?)
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
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.
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."
Great.. now instead of toshiba notebooks burning my lap, they will also irradiate my genitalia and give me mutated children!
those who control the past, control the future. those who control the present, control the past.
("Break your satellite? Need new parts? Just order on the universe wide web at uww.spaceparts.com!")
:-) Unfortunately the latency for the nearest root DNS server is 217 years.
Probably more like uww.spaceparts.co.tx.us.sol.arm17.milkyway .
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?
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.
Submarines use active fission, right? Pioneer's only harnesses energy from radioactive decay. It's much safer, and very low maintenance (for Pioneer, it's practically zero). I wasn't really positive on how often nuclear vessels need a refuelling--I thought I had read that the Nimitz's go for 8-10 years.
You're definitely right about nuclear is by far the safest energy available today. Its problem is that the word "nuclear" scares the bajesus out of folks who don't know any better.
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...
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]
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?
...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?"
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)
Its simply not possible.
Historically, the most inspirational statement possible.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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."
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.