Pioneer

[den]

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to venture out of the solar system, has fallen silent after traveling billions of miles from Earth on a mission that has lasted nearly 31 years, NASA said Tuesday.

Comments

[arcturax.livejournal.com]

Read about that... Saw another more informative article somewhere. It had some stuff which was truely amazing.

When it was launched from Earth, it was the fastest moving object ever sent up directly from Earth and still is. Currently, to save fuel and cost, they launch slower craft which slingshot around Earth and/or Venus to gain momentum that way. So Pioneer 10 was launched with a ton of fuel. It passed the moon in just 11 hours. It passed Mars in just 12 weeks and it reached Jupiter in a little over a year. It continued to do science and send back data until 1997 when signals were too faint to get more than telemetry from it. Now, even if its transmitter and power source are dead, it's mission isn't over. In two million years it will arrive at Aldebaran, about 60 light years away carrying a gold disc with a peaceful greeting from all mankind. Hopefully someone out there will discover it and look up and wonder who it was who sent this thing. At least they, unlike us, will know they are not alone. Of course it may never be found, but maybe, just maybe, fate has something more in store for Pioneer 10.

[weyrdbird.livejournal.com]

Is is just out of range? Or do new rules apply now that it's out there in deep space? Maybe someday something will find it and wonder, same as we, I agree. It's too bad that it couldn't even send pictures, even of vast black depths.

Is there an end to the universe? Is it round? Flat?
A big glob of spittle on the windowpane of Axis?
Who knows?

[arcturax.livejournal.com]

Range was on problem. The other is that its plutonium power source is nearing the end of its life. It wasn't "nuclear" powered. Instead if converted the natural radiation from a chunk of plutonium into electricity to power the craft. Once the plutonium has decayed past a certain point, the power levels drop until there is too little power to run the transmitters at a power level detectable at that range.

But it's mission isn't over yet. It will like as not float forever in space, bearing proof that we exist, or at least once did.

[arcturax.livejournal.com]

Found a better article here (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3198249&thesection=news&thesubsection=world) and it appears I wasn't entirely correct.

Basically, the plutonium is still good but the thermocouples which convert its heat radiation (from decay) into electricity have corroded away.

From the article:
" The last time it managed to answer, on January 22, the power of the signal that reached Earth was a billionth of a trillionth of a watt.

That made detecting it "like reading a book on Earth by a child's night light glimmering on the Moon", in the words of Dr Larry Lasher, the spacecraft's fourth project manager at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California."

The rest of the article is a fun read too, especially the conservatives protesting NASA sending "porn" into space, referring to the naked images of a man and a woman etched into a golden plaque onboard.