Pioneer 10 - Launched March 2 1972

In a few weeks it will be 35 years since the launch of Pioneer 10 and at
that time the fastest object to leave Earth.

While doing some checking on Pioneer stats, noticed that the Pioneer
web site seems to be off-line.

At the moment this link doesn't work.
(http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects)

Will be interesting to see why the web site is down.

The Pioneer information used to be on a server in the building where the
Pioneer Operations had been and that is all changed now.

I got the Space Projects web information moved from the N244 building
over to the Ames servers to keep the historical information available
but there was a lot of old Space Projects information there as well and
that division no longer exists in the present Ames structure.

I had hoped that the same long URL would be used as a lot of links will
break if you change the naming.

Google will certainly find you a lot of other links about the Pioneer 10
mission so all will not be lost if the site does not come back but I
feel like part of me has been erased.  The old photo is just getting a
bit more faded.  :-(


Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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http://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/sp349.htm
National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA History Office
SP-349/396
PIONEER ODYSSEY

Revised Edition

Richard O. Fimmel
Pioneer Project
Ames Research Center


William Swindell
Optical Sciences Laboratory
University of Arizona
   

Eric Burgess
Science writer


Prepared at Ames Research Center

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Scientific and Technical Information Office
Washington, D.C., 1977

Table of Contents <http://history.nasa.gov/SP-349/contents.htm>
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10
PIONEER 10

Approved in 1969, Pioneer 10 and its sister ship were designed to live up to their names: as first-time explorers intended to both gather data and report on conditions in the asteroid belt and in Jupiter-space; how they fared would be critical in the planning and technology of any future missions.^[1]

Pioneer 10 was built by TRW.^[2] It was light, at only 260 kg--30 and 27 kg of which were instruments and fuel, respectively.^[3] Like the Voyagers, it was powered by RTGs (SNAP-19s) containing plutonium-238, which provided 155W at launch, and 140W by the Jupiter flyby. The RTGs were mounted well away from the body, to prevent their radiation from interfering with the spacecraft's instruments.^[4]

Pioneer 10 was fitted with a plaque to serve as a message for extraterrestrial life, in the event of its discovery.

The spacecraft made valuable scientific investigations in the outer regions of our solar system until the end of its mission on March 31, 1997.

The Pioneer 10's weak signal continued to be tracked by the Deep Space Network as part of a new advanced concept study of chaos theory. After 1997 the probe was used in the training of flight controllers on how to acquire radio signals from space.

The last, very weak, signal from Pioneer 10 was received on January 23, 2003. A contact attempt on February 7, 2003 was not successful. The last successful reception of telemetry was on April 27, 2002; subsequent signals were barely strong enough to detect. Loss of contact was probably due to a combination of increasing distance and the spacecraft's steadily weakening power source, rather than failure of the craft. One final attempt was made on the evening of March 4, 2006, the last time the antenna would be correctly aligned with Earth. No response was received from Pioneer.^[5]

Pioneer 10 is heading in the direction of the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus at roughly 2.6 AUs per year. If Aldebaran had zero relative velocity, it would take Pioneer about 2 million years to reach it.^[6]

Snip

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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

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