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Space Science

Pioneer 6 -- Still Alive At 35 162

Posted by timothy from the longevity-longevity dept.
deglr6328 writes: "As a follow up to the /. story posted on Nov.30, NASA has successfully contacted its 35-year-old Pioneer 6 spacecraft. The probe downlink (at 16bps) was tracked by the 70 Meter Goldstone Deep Space Network dish, while transmitting with total of 8 watts RF power at distance of 83 million miles (133 million Kilometers). Amazingly cool if you ask me."
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Pioneer 6 -- Still Alive At 35 More

Pioneer 6 -- Still Alive At 35

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  • Someone forgot something... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hello, this is Pionner running some-weird-unknown-governement-OS v9.201.2pre9, please login:

    Login: root
    Password: ******
    Access denied.

    Login: root
    Password: ********
    Access denied.

    (operator shouts) Bob! I forgot the freakin' password! Or maybe did you change it?

  • Re:Old Idea (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Been proposed and around for awhile. Versions on the theme you have proposed have been used (or supposed to have been used if the spacecraft actually made it to the planet) on Mars for the landers to communicate back to Earth.

    Much easier to have a lander talk to an orbiter, which then talks back to earth.

    same thing with using craft orbiting around the sun, maybe 72 degrees apart, or so, at the radius of Jupiter or similar.

  • that pen (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was the ball-point pen that NASA invented for space. Fountain pens don't work quite as you'd hope in a 0g environment. Pencils produce graphite dust, and potentially the lead can break and float into instruments. The graphite can conduct electricity, so it doesn't play too well to use a pencil in space.

  • Re:well (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hmm.
    Either KTB is talking to himself, or these two will be breaking bed-springs before long.
  • It's not like everything they made 30 years ago is still around you know. There are plenty of 'old tech' solutions that weren't solutions at all. Next you will want to ban humans in space because that introduces the 'human error factor' and you will send chimps instead right?

  • You forgot about all the ionizing radiation -- all those gamma rays and other hard rads from the sun..? Then there's all the cosmic radiation. Its amazing that Pioneer 6 hasn't beome as brittle as an old leaf and just fallen apart.

  • How!?? (Score:1)

    by Bwah ( 3970 )
    What are they going to do, go out and retreive it???? That would be just a tad bit expensive.

    That said, I would LOVE to be a part of that kind of project ... designing an autonomous probe to track, close on and capture another object in solar orbit, then break solar orbit and return to near earth to be captured by the shuttle or something. It would be a very challenging design. Probably be a decent test bed for some NMD technology too.

  • NASA gets a lot of bad press for say, not doing metric conversions

    Well, they didn't have the time or money to double check :p Goes to prove the old axiom, "fast, good or cheap, pick any two".. In the expensive old days NASA could afford to build stuff to last..

    Your Working Boy,
  • Care to enlighten the rest of us?


  • Re:Wow (Score:1)

    by Mr Z ( 6791 )

    Hell, just the three-way TCP handshake would tie it up for quite awhile... (think RTT).

    --Joe
    --
    Program Intellivision! [schells.com]
  • Lots of the early probes failed, IIRC, it's just that nobody remembers the early failures.

    Yeah. It's too bad MTV doesn't air the rocket-crashing-on-the-launchpad "M" commercial anymore. (You know, one of the classics from the 80s.) Now I got that damn theme going though my head: Dum, Da Dum, Da dum, Da da da daDUM, Da Dum, Da dadada, Da dadadaDUM, Da Dum, Da dadada, Da dadada...

    Ok, so my posts tonight aren't exactly value-added. It's Saturday, ok?

    --Joe
    --
    Program Intellivision! [schells.com]
  • Sure would be nice if the fact checking at space.com were just a tad better than /. :)

    Get YOUR facts straight, bub. The 83 million mile figure applies to Pioneer 6 which is orbiting the sun and is 35 years old, not Pioneer 10 which is 28 years old and has left the Solar System .

    --Joe (getting a little peeved that the side reference to Pioneer 10 in the article has thrown everyone off.)
    --
    Program Intellivision! [schells.com]
  • Umm... perhaps you should read the actual article. The probe is in solar orbit. Pioneer 10 is the one way the fsck out there, Pioneer 6 is closer to the Sun than we are. =)

  • Pioneer 6 has orbited the Sun since its launch

    Nice for space.com to hyperlink SUN for everyone who doesn't know what it is.

  • >Constant radiation effects over large (decades)
    >periods of time, combined with extreme (and
    >inconsistent) temperatures

    Well, I've got these dishes that goes from the fridge to the microwave a lot...

    -LjM
  • It would be nice if you could read.

    Science: Pioneer 6 -- Still Alive At 35

    Notice: Pioneer 6. Six. Not ten. Six.

    Six.
  • That's the whole neat thing about the SR-71; it's NOT just a rocket. It uses jet fuel (albeit strange jet fuel) mixed with air for propulsion. Its ability to do this at mach 3+ for long periods of time is both unique and amazing.
  • I find the concept of a working ramjet more amazing than any standard turbojet+afterburner combination, no matter how advanced.

    The reason the SR-71 has to fuel up after takeoff is because the skin expands at the high temperatures in-flight (over a thousand degrees F on the hot spots, sustained!) and to make room for that, its fuel tanks leak like crazy when it's cooled off on the ground.
  • My brief research indicates that the V1 used pulse jet engines, which are related to ramjets only in that they both burn fuel to produce thrust.
  • There are several types of ramjet-like engines. The one with no moving parts is called a scramjet or something like that, I've forgotten the names. The SR-71's engines have plenty of moving parts, and they're moving during all phases of flight. Just the amount of control behind the movement of the big inlet spikes alone is incredible. And, of course, the engine has to run well below mach 3, too.

    Where else has a ramjet-style engine been used and gotten out of the experimental phase and into common use? I've never heard of any, not that it means anything. I'd be interested in any pointers.
  • Hey, umm, doesn't it take oxygen to oxidize??? "OH MY GOD, WE'VE HIT AN OXYGEN CLOUD... WERE GOING TO RUST..."

    But this is an excellent display of craftmanship, there are many other factors besides oxygen that should/could/will eventually make this thing as useful as a toaster.

    My question is, what did it say? I imagine it's something like "H..E....Lp...MEe. steeeeer tworads ssuuuun......"

    -Aaron
  • Pioneer 6 was placed in a Sun orbit at 74 million miles...it's closer to the Sun than Earth is.
    Maybe you're thinking of the
    Pioneer 10 which achieved solar system escape velocity and is approx 7 BILLION miles from earth

    Talk about the pot calling the kettle black..heheh
  • Um... we don't need space probes to measure the effects of radiation on materials. We've been building nuclear reactors for over 60 years now, it's pretty well understood what happens.
  • After several decades of quiet contemplation, the 16 bit message, mysteriously enough, was 42.

    good one....
    It took me a bit to remember the question though!

  • Funny, yes. But note, however, that NASA didn't try to send any commands to it, they only listened. So there actually was no conversation...
  • 133 million km isn't even 1 AU. They must've meant 133&nbsp Tm.
  • smack D'oh! Pioneer has steadily orbited the Sun at a mean distance of 0.8 AU
  • Well, you can laugh all you want, but the nobelprice winners of 1998 actually ended up talking about StarTrek, when discussing which final frontier the human race had.

    So I guess that your outburst just signals, that you bellong to the 80% of the less gifted here on earth.

    -H
  • those are awesome
  • You know, Mir has lasted like waaaay longer than intended. Pulling that off should be something for the engineers to strive for.
  • You know, here in Europe, i heard a joke: For space, NASA invented a pen that could write in a 0g environment. The russians just used a pencil.
    Not funny and not true. Pencils have a nasty habit of breaking and producing dust and shavings that are difficult to control in zero G and clog equipment. The way I heard it was when the need arose the Russians used the same pen the Americans had designed.
  • for the time frame that sounds a lot more senseible (sic)

    And you sir, are not.

    Are you completely dense? You obviously didn't take the time to check the facts yourself.

    And get yourself a spellchecker...

    (BTW, you really don't need a reason to do an anti-Katz rant.)

    --

  • It's not a matter of whether they can or can't keep contact with the probe. The probe is transmitting strong enough signals to pick up and always has been. The real issue is whether anyone cares about listening to it. It's not serving any purpose anymore, so noone listens to the signals. It's been transmitting for all those years. Just noone cares.

    This is really just a publicity thing. NASA is pumping up its successes to keep the funding flowing for the ISS.

    --

  • Sure, the question is "what's 6 x 7?"...

    That's not what the scrabble set says!
  • Or... send probes out in the manner you described toward outer solar systems, powered by ion drives... what's that, a 30 year mission to observe other stars and their planets? Maybe?
  • Ummm if you do any research at all about Voyager 1 and 2, you'll see that they were NOT sent on the same mission.
  • Using the same directional antenna with the same power, to the same antenna on the other end should reproduct a signal of approximately the same signal strength.
  • Excellent idea. Too bad I have no moderator points.

    "There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."

  • Actually, the answer is to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

    jedrek
    -- polish ccs mirror [prawda.pl]
  • You're thinking of the older Pioneer 10 and 11 craft that are leaving the solar system. Pioneer 6 is actually not that far away. (0.8 AUs from the sun, whereas we are 1.0 AUs away...)
  • "What's yellow and dangerous?"

    "No, no good, it doesn't fit the answer."

    "All right, What do you get if you multiply six by seven?"

    "No, no, too literal, too factual, wouldn't sustain the punters' interest."

    "Here's a thought. How many roads must a man walk down?"

    "Ah! Aha, now that does sound promising! Yes, that's excellent! Sounds very significant without actually meaning anything at all. How many roads must a man walk down? Forty-two. Excellent, excellent, that'll fox 'em. Frankie, baby, we are made!"

    --excerpted(with pieces removed) from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
  • The graphite is necessary for writing; clay just makes it harder

    That's true. They even tried using clay in early attempts at producing Viagra. The tests were considered unsucessful when not enough of the group were willing to stick their dicks in a kiln.

  • Imagine the network latency on that.

    # ping pioneer6.nasa.gov
    PING pioneer6.nasa.gov from earth.nasa.gov : 56 (84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=0 ttl=30 time=376667 ms
    64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=1 ttl=30 time=377687 ms
    64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=2 ttl=30 time=379852 ms
    64 bytes from pioneer6.nasa.gov: icmp_seq=3 ttl=30 time=376745 ms

    --- pioneer6.nasa.gov ping statistics ---
    4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
    round-trip min/avg/max = 376667/377737.6/379852 ms

  • In 35 years? Does anyone know what kind of path they sent this thing on? I mean, that's less than the distance from my chair that I'm sitting in to the Sun, which is some 92 million miles. Cassini I think has gone further than that, as has all Voyager probes and Pioneeer 10, which last I heard was in the cloud beyond our solar system. Maybe they should tell it to speed up
  • I'm much more impressed by the Concorde. Cruises at Mach 2 only(!), but while carrying 100 passsengers. People who know, say that its engines are the most complicated piece of engineering in the world. Plus, it is really amazing that it actually performs decently aerodynamics-wise at both sub and supersonic speeds. The SR-71 is *horrible* until it reaches cruising altitude and speed. It actually has to take off and then fuel up in the air!
  • Sounds like my mom.
  • its fuel tanks leak like crazy when it's cooled off on the ground.

    Hence the jelo fuel, so that it leaks less. :-) Anyway, ramjets have been used for other applications too (missiles), so they are not unique to the SR-71. Besides, a ramjet is the simplest possible engine, because it has no moving parts: just an inlet and a combustion chamber. A turbofan is much more complicated, because it has a ridiculous number of precisely engineered fanblades, gear assembly, a compressor, etc.
  • Why does this old tech last so long, while later gee whizz probes plummet into Mars?

    Lots of the early probes failed, IIRC, it's just that nobody remembers the early failures. Incidentally, the Russians probably had a lot more, including manned ones.

  • > Which alloys, compounds, solders, construction methods, etc. hold up best in space.

    Sure, all they need to do is go out there and grab it so they can look at the physical damage. You volunteering? :)


    --
  • NASA, and other engineering projects, use something called a design lifetime. For example, a spacecraft is designed to have a 0.95 probability of running for 5 years. This is the target that is used as the basis for many engineering decisions. How reliable do the components have to be, how much attitude control thruster fuel, how much excess solar cell capacity (solar cells degrade with age). The spacecraft will probably last longer than 5 years. You don't want to spend more money, or add the weight of redundant systems or extra fuel and solar cells, if it is not needed to meet the mission requirements.

    The disk drive in your computer was probably designed to last a certain length of time, say 5 years. When you see MTBF numbers on spec sheets, they are usually only valid for the design lifetime.

  • Care to enlighten the rest of us?

    Sure, the question is "what's 6 x 7?"...

    ---------------------------------------------

  • Idea? (Score:2)

    by mystik ( 38627 )
    I'm curious, If they want to keep contact with it, why don't they just send out a 'relay' probe behind it? Have the relay pick up the signal, and amp it and send it back to earth...
  • Why, the very first program the NASA engineers put on the satellite to test that it worked correctly, of course.

    H ..... e ..... l ..... l ..... o ..... W ..... o ..... r ..... l ..... d ..... ! ..... H ..... e ..... l ..... l ..... o ..... W ..... o ..... r ..... l ..... d ..... ! .....

    --

  • MEEPT!!!!!


    MEEPT!!!!! would like to agree completely with the above post. It is indeed nothing short of genius. MEEPT!!!!! has spent many hours squishing avocado between his/her/its toes while pondering the nature of NASA's flaws, and has come to the same conclusion. A computer can suffer from any number of flaws, while a good hand crafted abacus has very few problems, because it can be easily debugged by hand. MEEPT!!!!! humbly suggests that the space program get back to basics, and hire those crafty Chinese to craft the Official NASA Abacus.


    This MEEPT!!!! has been brought to you by the letters A, X, ll and the number 8.


    MEEPT!!!!!

  • You always hear NASA saying a probe they are sending somewhere is designed to work for only a month or six or something like that and then the probe goes on working for years even decades longer. Are they purposefully saying a space probe has a short life just so they can look good when it last longer? Or do they build these things better than they knew?

    Pioneer 6, I believe, is solar powered. I'm not sure really how long a nuclear battery will last on something like Voyager but if a probe has regular power from the sun, and is harden against radiation and temperature changes in space could it not last centuries?

  • I think you mean Voyager 6...not Pioneer 6.
  • Kind of like printing a test page...I would imagine
  • No sh*t...but the enemy in that movie was called V'Ger (I beleive that was the correct spelling)
    The 'oya' from Voyager was burned off.
  • Back in the 60s and 70s, probes were over-engineered with triply and quadruply redundant systems at great costs (back then nobody cared about costs). The last probes of that hardcore design are Cassini and Galileo. You know how resilient Galileo turned out. Also, the Vikings and the Voyagers, which cost shitloads of money and were very successful.

    Plutonium power generators have 87 year halflife, so power decreases by a factor of 2 every 87 years. So power would probably not be the limiting factor there, like in the case of Galileo for example.
  • Grandpa worked on the Pioneer line, not Voyager, so it's not his fault. That little twerp Johnson was the one who said, "Hey, let's make it tough enough to survive a wormhole!"

    The dope.

    www.matthewmiller.net [matthewmiller.net]

  • Yep. Did you also know that metal knives didn't replace flint knives until Roman times? While available for a few thousand years before then, it just wasn't possible to get a metal knife to keep an edge as well as flint until around the time of Rome's rise to power.

    Plus, a knife does more damage and doesn't have that pesky battery problem like a tazer.

    Stone knives don't care if an EMP hits you, or if a giant magnet is trying to extract all your weapons. Flint knives often have a sharper edge than many of the low to mid-range weapons sold today, and they're made of materials that require less energy and infrastructure to extract and shape. It's a lot easier to spend an hour making a new stone knife than it is to mine ore, refine the metal, shape it and sharpen it....

    AND they don't rust!

    www.matthewmiller.net, the web site that doesn't rust [matthewmiller.net]
  • Whaddya'll say we find out what signal it's using and /. the damn thing? ;-)
  • ...life begin at 40, or something like that?

    ---
  • Yeah but can you imagine how bad WAP would be if you only had 16bps!?
  • that Pioneer6 is a posterboy for spacecraft durability of the 60's, while todays probes are plagued with fatal problems. This is not the case.

    In fact the reason two identical spacecraft were sent on the same mission so often (voyager 1&2, and the many Pioneer probes for instance)was precisely because they were so prone to failure and malfunction(not to mention exploding on the launch pad), that it was economical to ASSUME one of the probes would fail and send two as a redundancy.

  • And I thought my modem was slow. Can't imagine waiting to download a web page on that link :)
  • Not quite... I read the government report on the incident a couple of years ago, and the engineers were quite adamant all the way through that launching was a bad idea, but since the air temperature in the immediate vicinity of the boosters (about 26 degrees F) was right on the edge of the theoretical envelope (a fact hesitently aknowledged by the engineers), MT managers passed the go-ahead on to NASA. The operations managers were apparently under severe pressure from the senior management to launch for financial reasons, and so, in fear of their jobs and possibly still in the OK zone, they called it in.

    Several MT engineers resigned in protest after the explosion, and I've heard rumors that at least one person (not sure if it was a manager or an engineer) committed suicide over it.
  • Right - and the story clearly says "Pioneer 6". Pioneer 10 is over 3 billion miles outside the solar system, while Pioneer 6 is orbiting the Sun and was meant to study solar wind, cosmic rays and the Sun's magnetic field.
  • 56 or 42?

    Number the letters of the alphabet sequentially from 1 to 26, then spell out "Love" and "War", adding the value of each letter together.

    Interesting?!?

  • bah, I'm bored..
    Oct 1 of 1997 was a Wednesday
    12418 days is roughly 34 years (freq drift on the internal clock? heh)
    erm
    the only obvious thing is that Linux came out in 1992.. but you knew that :P
    How old is Linus? Was he even alive 34 years ago? hehe
    -since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
  • The article says that it got a 16bit/s downlink from the satellite, but then later it says that all the instruments are turned off. What the hell is it transmitting then? Anyone know?

    It might be an interesting experiment to turn the instruments back on and check how well they still work to help the engineers building the space station. That data might improve its longevity and help it not turn into what Mir has become.

  • On space station Earth, with an atmosphere polluted by CO, NO2 and NO3, acid rains and other noxious compounds in our air, water, soil, and bodies...

    I'd imagine a satellite space station would potentially have a much cleaner, if not better, environment ^^

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • It really does depend on the skill of the combatants, I think, and not the crudeness or technical accomplishment of the weapon.

    For the poorly trained, I think the .45 magnum has tremendous amount of kickback, such that if the first shot is missed, the guy with the stone knife(essentially equivilent to a combat knife) almost certainly has the advantage.

    On the other hand, a stone knife in the hands of a inept klutz has only chance on his side ^^

    Then there's the fact that a magnum has only 6 or so shots, right?

    So it's still not conclusive ^^

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • So, it should looks like this :

    PING Pioneer_6 (198.116.142.34): 16 data bytes
    16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=0 time=443641 ms
    16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=1 time=440580 ms
    16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=2 time=448851 ms
    16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=3 time=446892 ms
    16 bytes from 198.116.142.34: icmp_seq=4 time=442157 ms
    ^C
    ----Pioneer_6 PING Statistics----
    5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss
    round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 440580/444424/448851
  • Kinda reminds me of when I had aol.

  • if it were running an irc client... (Score:3)

    by Skeezix ( 14602 ) <jamin@pubcrawler.org> on Saturday December 09, 2000 @08:05PM (#569585) Homepage
    /ping pioneer
    Ping reply from Pioneer : 887.28 second(s)
    <NASA> damn, this lag is a bitch.
    ----

  • Yeah, I goofed. (Score:3)

    by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Sunday December 10, 2000 @12:05AM (#569586)
    I got Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 6 mixed up. Pioneer 10 is at 3.2K, Pioneer 6 is in solar orbit.

    Re: the SR-71. I didn't use it to represent the pinnacle of technical progress; by today's standards, it's interesting but not fascinating. Same can be said about the Bell X-1. But by the standards of the day, both were absolutely stunning--and neither could have, would have, been designed if it'd been done in-house.

  • Re:How it really happened... (Score:3)

    by anticypher ( 48312 ) <anticypher@@@gmail...com> on Sunday December 10, 2000 @03:27AM (#569587) Homepage
    Silly, the craft is 15 years old. They'd be running a nice, solid AT&T unix. But with a 16bps maximum bitrate, it only takes 2 people to slashdot the probe.

    And if you know how, here's how its done:

    pioneer_control$ ping -w 4000000 -c 2 -s 2 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol
    10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=0 ttl=253 time=1437912.385 ms
    10 bytes from 98.6.10.6: icmp_seq=1 ttl=253 time=1044077.385 ms

    pioneer_control$ traceroute -w 4000000 -q 1 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol 16
    traceroute to six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6), 30 hops max, 16 byte packets
    16 204.6.124.194 (204.6.124.194) 139.096 ms
    17 154.13.2.47 (154.13.2.47) 161.395 ms
    18 38.1.25.230 (38.1.25.230) 124.904 ms
    19 204.6.150.17 (204.6.150.17) 133.634 ms
    20 jpl-gateway.nasa.gov (38.144.103.114) 235.643 ms
    21 orbital-gw.jpl.nasa.gov (38.201.67.7) 127.282 ms
    22 goldstone-gw.jpl.nasa.orb (98.10.1.31) 2033.643 ms
    23 heliotrope-orbit-gw-16bps.jpl.nasa.orb (98.11.244.254) 2391.654 ms
    24 antenna-70.jpl.nasa.orb.sol (98.144.2.1) 2169.122 ms
    25 six.pioneer.nasa.orb.sol (98.6.10.6) 1822431.987 ms


    You've just got to stop using those terrestrial based name servers run by the evil ICANN :-)

    the AC

  • Construction techniques (Score:3)

    by bugg ( 65930 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:57PM (#569588) Homepage
    Thirty five years! Congratulations to everyone at NASA for making contact, and more importantly to the engineers who designed and built this satelite!

    NASA gets a lot of bad press for say, not doing metric conversions, but this clearly is an example of excellent professionals doing their best. A lot of solder joints will oxidize and go bad before thirty five years.. this goes to show that the NASA engineers were not considering how long the probe was wanted when they built it, but rather built it for its maximum life. If only VCRs and such were built like that: today's consumer electronics have a bunch of cheap, light plastic parts :(

  • Re:Construction techniques (Score:3)

    by bugg ( 65930 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @02:25PM (#569589) Homepage
    No, oxidization is the loss of an electron. It can happen if there's anything around to receieve the electrons from the solder: most likely the result of the flux in the solder breaking down into something a bit more reactive. Or any other chemicals the board may have been exposed to breaking down and then reacting.

    Don't you remember highschool chemistry? LEO the lion says GER! (now I know I'm not the only one who learned that it's a mnemoic device to learn- Loss Electrons Oxidization and Gain Electrons Reduction)

  • Not quite, it actually is... (Score:3)

    by Myriad ( 89793 ) <myriadNO@SPAMthebsod.com> on Saturday December 09, 2000 @03:24PM (#569590) Homepage
    Sure, the question is "what's 6 x 7?"

    Not quite... it depends on your interpretation of the story. The closest HHGTTG actually comes to revealing the question is when Ford and Arthur start experimenting with the scrabble board towards the end of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

    Here it is revealed that the Golgafrincham have come to prehistoric Earth and are killing off the original populance - the members of Deep Thoughts experiment. They further reason that since Marvin mentioned that Arthur had the question printed in his brain wave patterns, that he may have a bastarised version. This is where scrabble comes in.

    In the end the (damaged) question is revealed by the scrabble pieces as follows:
    W, H, A, T, D, O, Y, O, U, G, E, T, I, F, Y, O, U, M, U, L, T, I, P, L, Y, S, I, X, B, Y, N, I, N, E

  • New Idea (Score:3)

    by NightHwk ( 111982 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:20PM (#569591)
    Has anyone considered using relay satelites that orbit around the sun.. say past mars or even further. We could use them to pick up faint signals from our outbound probes and relay them with more power back to earth.

    Think of it as a system wide internet =]

    Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.

  • Error detection/correction (Score:3)

    by stilwebm ( 129567 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @02:26PM (#569592)
    Is that 16bps before or after error correction/detection codes? I just remember reading about some of the error correction codes the later Pioneer probes used, and wondered how advanced the codes used on Pioneer 6 were.

  • Re:Exactly what did they downlink? (Score:3)

    by Fishstick ( 150821 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:57PM (#569593) Journal
    >It might be an interesting experiment to turn the instruments back on and check how well they still work

    Yeah, except I wonder if Pioneer can _receive_ at that distance?

    They used a 70 meter dish to pick up an 8w transmission from 133 million kilometers. So, guessing that the receiver on the spacecraft isn't much larger than a meter in diameter, how much power would you have to blast into space to be heard that far away? And is it listening? And what is the round-trip delay? Sheesh, talk about serious lag!

  • Three Centuries later.... (Score:3)

    by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:32PM (#569594)
    Pi'neer returns to destroy an earth made bland by balding men and unisex uniforms, plodding along aimlessly.

  • Re:Stuff they should check (Score:3)

    by wmoyes ( 215662 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @07:36PM (#569595)
    In space construction what really is the limiting factor. What burns out first?

    NASA has known the answer to this since the end of the cold war... FUNDING

  • www.pioneer6.orbit.sun.space.com (Score:3)

    by PiterPan ( 235179 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @02:31PM (#569596)
    In an unrelated news, NASA said they launched a new web site dedicated to the history of a series of their Pioneer probes. It can be reached at http://www.pioneer6.orbit.sun.space.com.

    However, the site seemed to be down during the first several hours after it's launch. We contacted one of the NASA representatives, this is what he told our reporter:
    "That site doesn't have enough bandwidth to handle thousands of requests from people all around the world. We also had to ban visitors that came from a popular discussion site Slashdot - there were just too many of them".

    To the question if NASA is planning on enhancing the communication channel, we were told that this is impossible at this time.

    Some people who were able to get through to the site, told us that it was very slow, download speed did not exceed 16bps. "You should not put banners on top of that page - it's slowing my browser to a halt", one angry web surfer said in an email to NASA.

    --

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @02:04PM (#569597)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • since they have successfully built a long-lasting probe:

    Effects of long term space radiation exposure on instruments, circuitry of all types. They have years of data now and can figure out exactly how the radiation affects performance.

    Which alloys, compounds, solders, construction methods, etc. hold up best in space.

    In space construction what really is the limiting factor. What burns out first?

  • Re:Exactly what did they downlink? (Score:3)

    by _570RM_ ( 262173 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:56PM (#569599) Homepage
    >That data might improve its longevity and help it not turn into what Mir has become.

    You wish the ISS becomes what MIR has been and still is and always will be: A space station that was built for 7 years and lasted twice that time!
    It was a great piece of equipment and when it finally gets its well deserved rest, we should all apreciate the data/experience it gave us.
    You know, here in Europe, i heard a joke:
    For space, NASA invented a pen that could write in a 0g environment. The russians just used a pencil.

  • Re:Exactly what did they downlink? (Score:4)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @02:08PM (#569600) Homepage
    It is transmitting something called housekeeping, or engineering, data. This is composed of things that describe the health of the spacecraft. For example, battery voltage, solar cell current, power consumption, command receiver lock and AGC, temperatures in various parts of the spacecraft. This is distinct from the science data, which includes measurements from the scientific instruments on board the spacecraft.

  • Re:Just how long should they last? (Score:4)

    by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @02:22PM (#569601)
    "Plutonium power generators have 87 year halflife, so power decreases by a factor of 2 every 87 years. So power would probably not be the limiting factor there, like in the case of Galileo for example."

    actually they will not last that long. yes, radiation(and therefore available energy) will decrease by half every 87 years, but the property that determines the AVAILABLE power to the spacecraft will not really be the half-life. it will be the degredation of the thermoelectric junction by dopant migration(due to heat). galileos RTG's already produce far less then half of what they did at launch. and they are only about 10 years old.

  • Re:Complex != Better (Score:5)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:45PM (#569602) Homepage
    Actually, it's the other way around. The old probes were made back when NASA had a lot of money and popular backing. They put a lot of work into getting them exactly right, no matter the cost.

    The new-era NASA doesn't have that luxury. The new plan is to make a lot of (relatively-speaking) cheap stuff and send it up with fingers crossed. Even if half of it fails, it's *still* a bargain.

    --

  • Transcript (Score:5)

    by Mike Schiraldi ( 18296 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:25PM (#569603) Homepage Journal
    I guess the conversation with Pioneer went something like this:

    "Hello, Pioneer? This is NASA."

    "NASA? My NASA? It couldn't be my NASA because you never call."

    "Listen, I--"

    "Are you eating right? You're not eating right, are you? Don't make that face, young man. I can tell."

    --

  • Re:Exactly what did they downlink? (Score:5)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @04:53PM (#569604) Homepage
    The article says that it got a 16bit/s downlink from the satellite, but then later it says that all the instruments are turned off. What the hell is it transmitting then? Anyone know?

    "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half-crazy, falling in love with you..."

    Kevin Fox

  • Makes no sense. (Score:5)

    by rjh ( 40933 ) <rjh@sixdemonbag.org> on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:55PM (#569605)
    I would ban all software but the most basic...

    They already do this. Have you ever seen avionics software? Much of it is written in Ada or its subsets, with intensive review and oftentimes provably-correct methodology, such as the Ada83 subset SPARK. (Note that provably-correct software is only provable to do what you tell it to do; it's not provably what you want done.)

    Why does this old tech last so long

    It doesn't. The Smithsonian and other museums are having a hell of a time with the Apollo spacesuits, because they're beginning to crumble away into nothingness.

    Keep in mind that Pioneer is being kept cryogenically cooled at 3.2K in a hard vacuum and far away from most sources of ionizing radiation. It's not exactly hard to keep tech operating in those kinds of optimal conditions.

    If I were NASA ... I would demand that all design work and construction take place in house

    That's why you're not NASA, and why I never, ever want to get my ass launched into orbit by a NASA-designed, NASA-constructed spacecraft. If you think NASA has all the brainpower, you're dead wrong. When it comes to avionics, the brainpower is in Boeing, Martin-Marietta, General Dynamics, Lockheed and other places in the same vein.

    Who designed the SR-21 Blackbird, one of the greatest aviation feats of all time? Free hint: it wasn't the government.

    Who designed the X-1, the first plane to fly faster than sound? It wasn't the government.

    If you're going to construct everything in-house, you're going to need a chip fab plant to build your own computer hardware. Never mind that we've got exhaustively-tested, radiation-hardened 386SX chips... we have to throw out the 386SX, even though it's a fine, well-proven chip, simply because it was designed by Intel, not "in house".

    You have to throw away the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters, even though they're masterpieces of engineering--one failure in the entire operational life of the Shuttle fleet, and Morton-Thiokol engineers warned NASA that launching in cold conditions would cause the failure. By every measurable standard, the Morton-Thiokol SRBs are fine and reliable pieces of engineering, when used within their specified tolerances (which are, BTW, pretty damn generous). Why? Because it wasn't designed or built in-house.

    Outside contracting to commercial companies does not work; they just cut corners and introduce mistakes.

    The SR-71 disagrees with you. As do the Shuttle's main engines. As do the Shuttle's solid rocket boosters. As do the United States' impressive array of spy satellites, the majority of which were constructed by TRW.

    Are you sure you still want to assert that outside contracting results in poor engineering and shoddy workmanship?

  • And the answer is.... (Score:5)

    by Argy ( 95352 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:22PM (#569606)
    After several decades of quiet contemplation, the 16 bit message, mysteriously enough, was 42.

  • As Grandpa says (Score:5)

    by doublem ( 118724 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:30PM (#569607) Homepage Journal
    Back in my day, we built probes that would last decades. Forget this disposable, one-use crap you kids go in for now. When we launched something, even if it was designed for a six month mission, we EXPECTED it to last until our grandkids were running things, so they could look up and know that we were better at building this stuff than they could ever hope to be.

    And we used a slide rule for everything! That little chunk of plastic and metal you use to play games has more computing power than all of NASA had when Pioneer 6 was launched!

    Brusing up on using a slide rule: www.matthewmiller.net [matthewmiller.net]

  • How it really happened... (Score:5)

    by rich22 ( 156003 ) on Saturday December 09, 2000 @01:36PM (#569608) Journal
    After bouncing the signal off a few moons in the outer part of our solar system, NASA scientists identified the Pioneer Spacecraft easily when they logged in - login: nasa password: Linux 0.0.1test1 Last login: Fri Oct 1 12:42:57 +0500 1997 from nasa.gov You have mail. nasa@pioneer:~$uptime 6:30pm up 12418 days, 12:41, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.01

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