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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."
Funny I was just reading about Pioneer a day ago. The Pioneer Plaque is very interesting to think about... just imagine an extraterrestrial life finally reading this plaque. I can't ever imagine what a super-intelligent race could do with it.
Just think about it. We think of aliens as being these super intelligent creatures capable of time travel and the ability to travel at the speed of light. We are probably wrong. There are probably races that are millions of times more advanced then or there are races that are millions of times dumber. Then there is that change that the human race is the only one in existence, but then you can start thinking about Multiverse.
It's absolutely mind-boggling about some of the ideas out there. The scary thing is that the reality might be exactly what sci-fi authors are telling us.
Did they use CCD's? How did cameras on board space probes work back then?
.. I think Voyager did use CCD's.
Anyone know
In fact, it was the Voyager probe that we lost contact with ... Pioneer 10 got shot to hell by the Klingons at the beginning of Star Trek VI.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Um... hello? Have you not heard of Cassini? Sure, there may have been some fly-bys of Saturn and its moons in the past, but certainly none that are going to be spending a few years in the area. If the latest group of pictures from Phoebe are any indication...
Troll.
Imagine if moore's law applied to space flight...
How close to the speed of light would our space ships be traveling? Anybody?...
Of course, the most important contribution of Pioneer 10 to fundamental physics may be the Pioneer Anomaly : http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9808081
I guess attempting to fly through a comet's tail and return samples to earth isn't very impressive. Nor is landing a probe on a comet. Or on a moon of Saturn. Or taking samples of a near-earth asteroid and returning them to earth.
There is plenty going on. Not as much as I would like, but still a lot more than most people think.
Actually, there's not much evidence that Voyager 1 ever passed the heliopause. About half-a-year ago, there were reports that Voyager 1 detected a sudden drop in the velocity of the solar wind, but it was extremely short lived and could have been due to problems with the recorder/computer. One group claimed this was evidence Voyager 1 passed the heliopause, but two other scientific groups said that it had not. At any rate, all groups agreed that after that drop (if it even had occured) Voyager 1 was definitely now within the heliopause. (Keep in mind the distance to the heliopause can vary greatly over time, depending on how active the Sun is.)
Voyager 1 is at about 91 AU right now from the Sun (that's 91 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth--one AU is 93 million miles). Pioneer 10 is nowhere near that far. The heliopause is thought to average 120 AU from the Sun. So, Voyager 1 probably has about 10-15 years of travel left to go to definitely leave our solar system and reach interstellar space--defined as where the electromagnetic forces of the galaxy as a whole (the interstellar winds) have more influence than the electromagnetic forces of our Sun (solar wind).
Interestingly enough, Voyager 1 has about 14-16 years left of electricity (from its nuclear generator) to run its scientific instruments and communications. If the heliopause is more than 120 AU out there, Voyager 1 will pass into interstellar space eventually, but Voyager might be a dead hunk o' metal and we may not get any info about the event.
I guess there are a few professional rocket scientists hanging out here (and plenty of amateurs...), so now is a good time to ask a question that has bugged me for a long time:
:)
Has any consensus been reached over what has caused the unexpected change in velocity of the Pioneer 10 and 11, Ulysses and Galileo probes? Remember this?
Since this was announced I've done some regular googling to see if this has ever been adequately explained. There are plenty of pages out there with plenty of theories, but most of the sites discussing this also have theories about things like zero-point energy generators, perpetual motion machines, that sort of stuff... Hardly the sort of thing that smells of proper scientific method.
Other theories include drag from dust, Changing velocity of light and "tired light redshift" (what the HELL is THAT???)
I have found this paper, which looks very interesting, and much more authoritive, but its is unfortunately waaay over my head!
There is still a lot of discussion on this topic, can any astrophysics lurking here comment? Are we looking at a modification of gravity? Does this tie in with dark matter/energy?
Ta
And in 50 years from now, some space-tourists will play catch-up with it, just because they're curious what became of it
Hi - why can't NASA try to use some nearer spacecratt (Cassini, Mars Express etc.) to communicate with Pioneer 10?
Your absolutely correct. It gets down to the basic problem in space science and that is how to market information to the public. What gets me is that I can turn on the discovery channel and watch hour after hour of Palio this and Volcano that (all very important areas of research, I'm not dogging them). Why arn't there more programs made that describe the current NASA missions, design and development phases, the mission it self. Some of the great science that comes from it etc.. I guess it comes down to the fact that the Fe/O ratio is just not as cool as a Raptor claw.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
Sedna and Pluto are both considered Kuiper Belt Objects. Pluto is considered a planet in addition to a Kuiper Belt Object. Sedna is not considered a planet.
In reality, I'd say both are Kuiper Belt Objects, but not planets.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Sedna's not a planet.
For that matter, a lot of people don't think of Pluto as a planet either.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
From everything NASa has said, the minimum duration for the Mars rovers to be considered a "sucess" was 90 days.
It's clear, that like all good engineers, NASA folks designed it to exceed that length of time (who designs to just fit minimum requirements anyway?) if at all possible.
Will they last 30+ years? Probably not. Given that they do have human input, someone's going to tell a rover to do something stupid, and the rover will do it, dispite it's obstical avoidance software.
However, hats off to the NASA engineers of old, who have made things to last in an enviromnt where we still don't know a heck of a lot about.
From "The Cosmic Connection" by Carl Sagan:
"The principle feminine criticism is that the woman is drawn incomplete -- that is, without any hint of external genitalia. The decision to omit a very short line in this diagram was made partly because conventional representation in Greek statuary omits it. But there was another reason: Our desire to see the message successfully launches on Pioneer 10. In retrospect, we may have judged NASA's scientific-political hierarchy as more puritanical than it is."
He then goes on to cite cases of newspapers who, uh, removed the man's naughty bits when they published the picture.
So, in short, the reason the "slit", as you so poetically called it, is missing is that we Americans are hung up about sex.
Now you know.
I remember this date, because NASA set up a 900 number celebrating the event where you would call and listen to a little talk about how far Pioneer 10 had travled and then you could hear the "beep beep noises" coming from beyond the orbit of Neptune.
My grandmother dialed the number for me (on a rotary dial phone!) and got mad since I listened to it twice, fearing it would charge her twice as much.
This comment is so far down, I'd be surprised if noticed by anyone.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.