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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
...
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
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
When people ask me, "What sign?" I say, "Sputnik."
:)
If you think you feel old now, wait until you start getting old, my son.
America's oldest man died on Monday. He was actually born in a log cabin and of high school age when the Wright Bros. first flew at Kitty Hawk.
Think about that one the next time you feel "old." Your world has hardly moved at all compared to his.
KFG
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.
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?)
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.
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."
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
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?
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?
...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)
We need a new space race. In the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. was in competition with the Soviet Union for the exploration of space. The race began with Sputnik and ended with the Moon landing in 1969. Since then, the Soviets/Russians have concentrated on the space station (Salyuts and Mir) and the U.S. has concentrated on the Space Shuttles. This has lead to the current International Space Station.
What we need is a new space race to get us (Humankind) off of our duffs. If China gets their space program off the ground the way they want to, we may see one. Then things will really start to move again. Man back on the Moon, missions to Mars, and more (and better) automated spacecraft exploring the solar system. Pioneer 10 was a well built, wonderful space craft. I'd love to see new ones of that calibur made with today's technology. We just need the incentive.
Beware of Sleestak