Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
...
Did anyone else read that and think of the Verizon Wireless commercials?
"Can you hear me NOW?!?"
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
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.
No offense but if NASA's DSN network, the most advanced tracking and recieving facility in the world, cannot detect it why would you think 1000 amateur astronomers would have any luck? I pulled this from the Voyager home page but presumably Pioneer would be much weaker:
" The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level. "
Then again I am no radio expert so maybe what you describe is feasible.
Actually, other than the low temperature the enviroment of space isn't very harsh.
It's when you start getting near things, like planets and stars, that things get dicey.
Pioneer is heading the other way, and there isn't any reason that it shouldn't drift on for millions of years, God willing and the crick don't rise none.
That's why they affixed the infamous plaque to it.
KFG
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."
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'
---..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.
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
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?
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.
...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)