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]

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.