Remembering Pioneer 10

Daniel Goldman writes "Twenty one years ago today, Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to leave our solar system, by crossing the orbit of Neptune (which was then the farthest planet from the Sun). Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt, the ring of giant rocks beyond Mars. It survived and zoomed on to Jupiter in late 1973, where it became the first spacecraft to take close-up photographs of the storms on the giant planet's surface. After Jupiter, it kept going, collecting data on the particles and radiation it encountered. More info about Pioneer 10 at Wikipedia."

Comments

Re:eh

[beeplet]

which was then the farthest planet from the Sun
Yeah, I hate the way they keep adding new planets. Oh, you meant farthest known...

No, they meant that Pluto has an eccentric orbit, which crosses the orbit of Neptune. Between 1979 and 1999, Pluto was the 8th planet from the sun, and Neptune the 9th.

Uh, no...

[Anonymous Coward]

The edge of the solar system is the heliopause. Pioneer 10 has not gotten close to that. The honor of the first man-made object to leave the solar system belongs to Voyager 1, launched over 25 years ago.

Re:Uh, no...

[Bad D.N.A.]

The more you understand the observations the more compelling the evidence is and there was certainly no problem with any of the relevent systems. In addition the time period you refer to was certainly not short lived. The duration was on the order of months. The solar wind instrument on V1 failed a long time ago so there is no direct observations of the solar wind available. However, energetic particles also sense the solar wind and these particles are measured. The solar wind velocity can be determined from the particle anisotropies because of the compton-getting effect, to within around 20%. And it's the observations and analysis of these particles that is at the source of the reports. There is certainly no agrement on this issue yet but it is an extremely active area of research.

What is sad about this whole issue is that after a very long mission and the first real interesting observations in a very long time both V1 and V2 are in jeprody of being shut off by NASA. The presedential proposal to go to mars is not being funded at all at this point and therefore to fund the beginning phases of this effort the necessary funding to these (and many more) missions may be cut. But I guess thats typical government waste... Send the damn things out to 90 AU and then turn them off for political reasons, just when things are getting interesting.

Re:Long Live Pioneer 10

[deglr6328]

For those looking for a more in depth study of the pioneer missions to the outer planets, this book published in the late 70's (now fully online) is truly a hidden gem from NASA's site. It details every last design aspect of the spacecraft in extremely high detail. We've certianly come a long way in ~30 years from grainy washed out Pioneer photopolarimeter images to super high resolution ultrasharp CCD images from Cassini.

Re:Engineering at its finest

[DeepBlueDiver]

Pioneer was supposed to die after reaching the outer planets, but it died in late 2003.

Pioneer 10 is not really dead, it is just so far away we can no longer hear it.

Re:Engineering at its finest

[BillyBlaze]

Quoting from the article...

Pioneer 10's final signal (after two previous failures) was received on January 22, 2003. As of February 25, 2003, NASA came to the conclusion that the craft's radioisotope power source was no longer functioning well enough for further contact with Earth.

Re:Pioneer's unexpected deceleration?

[coast99]

There was recently a conference about the
Pioneer Anomaly and the conference webpage
has links to various attempts of explanation.
[http://www.zarm.uni-bremen.de/Pione er/]

As far as I know, there is no consensus if the
anomaly has a trivial explanation
(gas leaking from satellite, dust in the
solar system etc.) or if something non-trivial is happening, such as a quantum garvity effect,
dark matter etc.