An Early NASA Pioneer Still On The Job In Deep Space

It took a little extra effort, but NASA this weekend bridged a nearly seven-and-a-half billion mile span to make contact with Pioneer 10, a plucky space probe that first left Earth's gravitational pull more than 30 years ago.

On Friday, scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Deep Space Network in Goldstone, Calif., sent a signal to the spacecraft, which is still hurtling toward the fringes of the solar system. Twenty-two hours later, at 1:47 p.m. EST, researchers at the network's facility in Madrid, Spain, carefully monitoring a 70-meter dish antenna, heard Pioneer's response.

"We are overjoyed that we still have the spacecraft," said Robert Hogan, chief of NASA Ames Research Center's Space Projects Division, where the Pioneer project is managed.

Pioneer 10 has been discounted in the past, but somehow it always manages to land on it feet," recalled Pioneer 10 Project Manager Dr. Larry Lasher of Ames, located in California's Silicon Valley. "This success is a testament to good solid design."

"From Ames Research Center and the Pioneer Project, we send our thanks to the many people at the Deep Space Network and JPL who made it possible to hear the spacecraft signal again," said Pioneer 10 Flight Director David Lozier.

NASA previously lost contact with Pioneer 10 in August 2000, but made contact again in April of last year by switching the spacecraft to a different communications mode. NASA most recently made contact with the spacecraft on July 9, 2001.

Launched on March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10, built by TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, Calif., is now 7.4 billion miles from Earth.

Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to pass through the asteroid belt and the first to make direct observations and obtain close-up images of Jupiter. During its tour of the Jovian system, Pioneer 10 also charted Jupiter's intense radiation belts, located the planet's magnetic field, and established that Jupiter is predominantly a liquid planet.

In 1983, it became the first man-made object to leave the solar system when it passed the orbit of Pluto, the most distant planet from the Sun.

The spacecraft continued to make valuable scientific investigations in the outer regions of the solar system until its science mission ended on March 31, 1997. Pioneer 10's weak signal continues to be tracked by the Deep Space Network as part of an advanced concept study of communications technology. The probe was also used to help train flight controllers how to acquire radio signals from space.

Pioneer 10 is headed toward the constellation Taurus, where it will pass the nearest star in the constellation in about two million years.

"Pioneer 10 has performed much better than expected," added Hogan, who is also a member of the original launch team for the spacecraft. "It's amazing that it's lasted this long."

Scientific data received from Pioneer 10's Geiger-Tube Telescope instrument is analyzed by original principal investigator Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, who discovered the Earth's radiation belts bearing his name.

Based on the previous data received, Van Allen concluded that galactic cosmic radiation is being moderated by the Sun's influence, meaning Pioneer 10 has not yet crossed the boundary into interstellar space.

Well, let's see: The target of this space probe was the planet Jupiter, which Pioneer 10 reached approximately one year after launch. So, we've gotten 29 bonus years due to, as Dr. Lasher of Ames Labs put it, "good solid design."

Now, is it just possible, as well, that when our focus was on actual scientific engineering and design --- versus affirmative discrimination, perversity through diversity, and various other social engineering efforts --- we tended to make better products? Not that we still can't, of course, but with a couple of recent, less-than-successful Mars expeditions tends to make one pause and wonder for a moment.

And, while I'm thinking about it, what does this space effort say about the liberals' rant about one culture being just as good as another? The Taliban is about 13 centuries away from this sort of thing. And even though France put up the SPOT satellite, does anyone really believe those cheese-eating surrender monkeys could accomplish the same as this? And we did this 30 years ago!

And, just to round out the opportunity to offend a few more leftists, does anyone even dare to think about what sort of design the Pioneer 10 plaque (pictured below) would look like if the satellite were to have been launched today rather than in 1972? The woman would have to be as tall as the man, we would have had to include the "other sexes" (sodomite, lesbian, and transgendered --- 5 in all, according to the Beijing Conference on Women a few years ago), and identity politics for that plaque would have made the recent controversy over the WTC "flag-raising" sculpture pale by comparison. Thank God we put a better foot forward in 1972 for all the Universe to see.

Info on plaque:

The Pioneer plaques were designed by Dr. Carl Sagan, one of the founders and first president of the Planetary Society, and drawn by his wife, Linda Salzman Sagan. On the plaque stand a human man and woman, the man's hand raised in a gesture of good will. The outline of the man and woman were determined from results of a computerized analysis of the average human. The key to translating the plaque is understanding the breakdown of hydrogen - the most common element in the universe. Hydrogen is illustrated in the upper left-hand corner of the plaque in schematic form and shows the hyperfine transition of neutral atomic hydrogen. A silhouette of the spacecraft, the planets in our solar system, and the position of our Sun in relation to 14 pulsars and the center of the galaxy are also illustrated on the plaque.

(From: http://www.planetary.org/html/seti/seti-messages-pioneer.html).

Included on both spacecraft is the small gold-plated aluminum plaque which the figures of a man and a woman are shown to scale next to a line silhouette of the spacecraft. The bracketing bars on the far right are the representation of the number 8 in binary form (1000), where one is indicated above by the spin-flip radiation transition of a hydrogen atom from electron state spin up to state spin down that gives a characteristic radio wave length of 21 cm (8.3 inches). Therefore, the woman is 8 x 21 cm = 168 cm, or about 5' 6" tall.

The bottom of the plaque shows schematically the path that Pioneers 10 and 11 took to escape the solar system - starting at the third planet from the Sun accelerating with a gravity assist from Jupiter out of the solar system.

Also shown to help identify the origin of the spacecraft is a radial pattern etched on the plaque that represents the position of our Sun relative to 14 nearby pulsars (i.e., spinning neutron stars) and a line directed to the center of our Galaxy. The plaque may be considered as the cosmic equivalent to a message in a bottle cast into the sea. Sometime in the far distant future, perhaps billions of years from now, Pioneer may pass through a planetary system of a remote stellar neighbor, one of whose planets may have evolved intelligent life. If that life possesses the technical ability and curiosity, it may detect and pick up the spacecraft and inspect it. Then the plaque with its message from Earth may be found and deciphered.

(From: http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/sso/cool/pioneer10/mission/)

Note: A bigger picture of the Pioneer plaque is here:

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/pioneer/other/plaque.gif

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