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Remembering Pioneer 10

Posted by michael on from the where-no-man-has-gone-before dept.

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."

9 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Leaving the solar system by Jardine · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

    I guess that depends on where you define the edge of the solar system. What about the Oort Cloud? What about that tenth planet we can never seem to pin down?

    1. Re:Leaving the solar system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oort cloud is just a theory and unfortunatly has become gospel in the laymen's world.

      AFA, the end of the solar system, the heliopause is a better "backyard fence" as it is the boundry between the solar wind and interstellar space.

    2. Re:Leaving the solar system by Deadstick · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, though I haven't checked this specifically, I'd call it a good bet that the orbit of Pluto was the last one the probe crossed. Pluto's orbit passes inside Neptune's rather briefly, and most of it lies well outside.

      Of course, "briefly" is a bit relative: Pluto has traveled only a bit over a quarter of the way round its orbit since we first saw it.

      rj

  2. Long Live Pioneer 10 by NETHED · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Long Live Pioneer 10. It is amazing to think that a human creation has traveled so far and survived so long.

    Built back when things were made to last, Pioneer 10 (according to WiKi) was still used as a training platform just a few years back.

    And the two Mars rovers are a reminder that smart people still are working for NASA, as they have out lasted anyone's prediction.

    Makes me proud /Rant

    --
    --sig fault--
    1. Re:Long Live Pioneer 10 by BTWR · · Score: 3, Insightful
      ...it was only a matter of time...

      ...before some Slashdot reader chalks up the sucess of firing a rocket, sending it millions of miles across space, separating in a dozen stages, landing (which requires maneuvers to be calculated and carried out to the second), setting itself up, finding earth, (refinding earth by itself after losing contact), landing directly bulls-eye within a target picked from hundreds of millions of miles away, finding near PROOF for the first time of the theory of Mars having been water-filled...

      into a "fluffed up" assessment of what success is.

  3. Engineering at its finest by bobhagopian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's truly amazing about Pioneer and all the other satellites of the era is that they have lasted so far beyond their expected lifetimes. If I remember correctly, Pioneer was supposed to die after reaching the outer planets, but it died in late 2003. The work they do at NASA and especially JPL (where most of the unmanned devices are designed and built) is truly impressive, and even more so considering there usually aren't any second chances available (with the noteworthy exception of Hubble).

    1. Re:Engineering at its finest by Penguinshit · · Score: 4, Insightful


      Which merely means, given a literal translation, that it was no longer producing enough power to make a strong enough signal to be detected by Earth. The signals were already so weak as to be useless for telemetry purposes. The satellite is probably still taking telemetry and trying to transmit. We just can't hear it anymore.

      I feel kind of sad and also kind of proud to think about it.

      --

      I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...

  4. Re:It's a blast by pomakis · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Well, we are very, very close to the point where we'll be able to send AI-guided probes out into the galaxy at near-light speeds. Logically, if any race even just a bit more advanced than us were living nearby, we'd already be encoutering their probes flying around our system.

    So you're saying that we're "very, very close" to having the technology to send a probe to each of the several billion star systems in our galaxy? Let me tell ya, bub, we're nowhere near that, by a long shot! Sure, I'm willing to believe that within the next hundred years or so we'll probably have the technology be able to whip a probe off somewhere at near light speed. But a few billion? Just where do you think we're going to get the raw materials for this project? And the energy? And the political willpower?

    Also, you're assuming that any civilization that happens to evolve to that level of intelligence and skill will necessarily want to make contact via physical probes (which further assumes that they're interested in making contact at all, which is another matter entirely). It seems more likely to me that in the interests of practicality, sending messages via electromagnetic waves or some other form of ether would be the more common way to reach out to the rest of the galaxy. And as far as we know, there may be several of these messages hitting our humble little planet as we speak. SETI has thus far barely touched the surface in its attempt to scan the heavens at the various likely frequencies looking for such messages.

    (As an aside, lets assume for the moment that we may actually be the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy at the moment. There are still billions of other galaxies out there that may also contain intelligent life. Unfortunately, the distances we're talking about here are so incredibly vast (way vaster than the already-mindboglingly vast distances between the stars in our own galaxy), that the chances of ever knowing whether intelligent life exists (or had ever existed) in another galaxy is pretty much zero. Pretty depressing, really.)

  5. Re:It's a blast by Temporal · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Uh... No, we are not going to produce a billion of them. We will produce a handful and send them to the nearest stars. They will then replicate themselves using raw materials available at those stars and move on. Remember, each of these things will be loaded with an AI much more intelligent than any human. And, frankly, with the exponential rate of advancement we are experiencing, we will have such AI within a half-century... probably 25 years. See Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiratual Machines for some pretty convincing math to back up these predictions.

    But, even if you don't believe that... Do you think we'll have such technology within 10,000 years? Because even 10,000 years is a lot less that 80,000 years, and could still be considered "very, very close" when compared with the five billion years we've spent evolving.

    And, yes, I am assuming that any civilization with the ability to do so will want to explore the galaxy physically, not just sit back and watch it. I don't think that's such a stretch.