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Space

NASA Contacts Pioneer 10 110

Posted by michael from the klingons-didn't-get-it-after-all dept.
Spaceboy writes: "NASA scientists said Sunday they have contacted the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, ending fears that the robotic probe had gone silent 29 years into a mission that has carried it more than 7 billion miles from Earth. Here's the story at excite.com." NASA still maintains a Pioneer webpage, which has been updated with recent information.
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NASA Contacts Pioneer 10 More

NASA Contacts Pioneer 10

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  • Re:sign of the times (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    so you dont think that nasa's call for low cost and short development time (ie less than 3 years) on missions has anything to do with it?

  • The sad Irony (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So Pioneer bears a plaque with a message of good will. Launched from the country who's economy depends on war, and with the highest prison population. Not that the rest of the world is much better. "Sure aliens, come on down, it'll be good times for all."

  • Re:sign of the times (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe that's the problem with the probes....The programmers are programming them in bash

  • Re:Round Trip (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wouldn't the time inbetween those pings increace arithmatically, because afterall, there is a 20 hour time delta....Not to be Anal, or anything, of course... *grin*
  • Do you people who post this kind of thing actually write code for a living? Better individual programmers don't guarantee better software, although they certainly help. Humans are fallible and bad at keeping track of details. It's communication, creativity, discretion and process, mostly group effects, that make good, large software possible.

    Whether a project team is centralized or distributed, whether the code is proprietary or open, make little difference. Terabytes of crappy software has been spewing out of proprietary teams for over half a century; why should open projects be any different?

    It's easy to look at the hundreds of crappy open source projects and deduce that open source software sucks in general, but they're *visible*. You don't see the bad code in proprietary software, you just swear at Bill Gates and reboot.

    The open projects that really have it together are an order of magnitude better organized, managed, documented and tested than most proprietary software.

  • no, a port scan would take about 21 hours and some minutes to complete...

    portscanning is not pinging -- you can do it in paralel :)

  • err, a better analogy used in most chemistry books lately is the dart analogy.

    A guy throws 10 darts that all hit nearly the same spot about an inch from the edge of the target. That's precision.

    A guy throws 10 darts that all hit in a randomly distributed area around the bullseye. That's accuracy.

    A guy throws 10 darts and they all hit the exact middle of the board. Now you lost the bet.
  • inhouse software


    implying that they are not software companies, thus my entire argument does not apply! *ank*, thanks for playing.

  • Stupid question...

    What is a DC-DC converter? Why would one need to convert DC power to DC power? Stepping it to a different voltage, or something?

    (Clearly, yes, I *am* almost entirely ignorant of electrical engineering, thank you.)

  • Isn't this old news? I remember seeing this quite a while ago in some newspapers and tech journals. Or is this a different event?
  • Seems to me that since they will lose the signal
    not to far in the future, it would make more
    sense to turn it around and bring it back to
    earth orbit if they have the fuel. They should
    be able to learn something about the long term
    effects of exposure to space from it.
  • hahah, touché I second that idea! And while we're at it, we can install a bunch of webcams to see their stunned reactions. at finding a desolate planet.
  • not for just 4 pings, they are sent out every second. If it waited for a reply before sending the next then yes, but thats not the way it works :)
  • ha!

    more like
    "request timed out"

  • I think you might mean when they contacted Pioneer 6 (IIRC it was 6) in December last year. This is a different probe.

    ---
    James Sleeman
  • but it has fixed itself, certainly not something you can claim about Windows.

    Hey, windows fixes itself.. it just needs a reboot. Problem is that it fixes itself too often, like always ;)
  • (It's very late - I wasn't expecting the /. effect right now...does /. have server log data
    pubished anywhere?
    Dang. It was late...
  • Of course Pioneer should have a map on it. How else are we going to get our 'ball' back when it lands in our neighbours garden? Lets just hope they have better map reading skills than some people I know, or there will be a bunch of really disappointed aliens turning up on the third planet of some other star.
  • I was born on that day when Pioneer 10 launched. I recall as a kid being in the library and finding out by accident that I was born the same day it launched, and I remember feeling bit of awe at the thought.

    When I happen to remember Pioneer, between beers at my usual party, I do toast it, and hope that I'll live as long as that probe! :-) guess I better cut back on the beers ;-)

  • It's still going to be pretty faint though.
    Remember, it's 8w from a "point source" as opposed to something the size of a deep sky object.
  • Well I doubt it will, but I would hope that this would inspire the current breed and future enginners to once again stirve to build the bad ass probes of old. While I'm no engineer I always appreciate machines and things that are build to last. Be it old cars that still run fine today, to die cast toys which are still in good condiation 20 years later, while the plastic ones break in only 2 years or so.
  • You are absolutely correct. Low Cost and Short Development Time result in junk technology.

    Stated differently: Free software that is distrubuted under a policy of Release Early, Release Often is generally trash.

  • See Glenn, N6GN [sonic.net]'s page What's the problem? [sonic.net].

    5W NBFM transmitter, 146MHz (amateur 2m band)

    Theoric distance of over 10,000 miles (in free space).

  • Oh My God, I think I'm going to wet myself laughing.
    All your base belong to ---===*> XO
  • Ironically, I had an interview today for a training course specifically aimed towards IBM Mainframe Operating with OS/390. One of those ironies eh?
    • I no longer think that it is possible to change it

    Why would you want to? More carcasses to strip and integrate into The Project. Mine's a security bot with integrated flashbulb tazer, betamax VCR capability and Data-Over-CB networking. ;)

  • A cellphone in the moon would be the one of the brightest extraterrestrial radio sources.

    Yeah, but what is the Loonies' brain cancer rate?

  • Re:Holy Crap! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Your receiver is not sensitive/tuned enough to detect it...8 watts is fairly heafty, actually. Let it be known that I would not like an 8W microwave pointed at my head.

  • Re:Oh, puleeez (Was: Re:sign of the times) (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Then you yourself know full well, that the amount of testing done on any OSS product amounts to no more than releasing the code, and waiting for users to email the author with "This doesn't work" comments.

    The "Release Early, Release Often" system completly sidesteps the issue of QA Testing on the final code. The day I see an OSS project with a "Download the Testplan!" link on it's homepage, is the day the Devil puts his skates on. I swear.
  • If they have the fuel, indeed. This object is travelling at more than 27,000 miles per hour. It never carried anything remotely close to the quantity of fuel that would be required to accelerate enough to "turn it around". I'm amazed it still has enough fuel to stay stabilized.

    -Mars
  • Stupid question...

    What is a DC-DC converter? Why would one need to convert DC power to DC power? Stepping it to a different voltage, or something?

    Yes, DC-DC converters are used to convert DC power to a different voltage (or polarity). One place you see them is on computer motherboards, where you have (for example) 3.3V available but you need 1.8V to power your CPU. A DC-DC converter can step the voltage down without wasting much of the power (as you would if you used a linear voltage regulator, or a resistor). DC-DC converters can also step voltages up, for example when you need to generate 300V for a camera flash from a 1.5V battery.

  • That's cool. My main point was that it's process (including code reviews) that makes good software, not just good programmers. Open projects don't necessarily have any advantage or disadvantage when it comes to process.

    Everyone hates testing, that's why lots of companies have dedicated QA departments. Many well-managed open projects have automated unit and regression tests, but functional testing is boring and better left to early adopters.

    Users of open software are used to seeing "stable" and "unstable" releases both available, and they choose what's appropriate to their needs and level of risk tolerance.

  • Space probes are not cars. A probe that costs four times as much and lasts twice as long may be worth it. A car that costs four times as much and lasts twice as long is not a car that I will be purchasing.
  • So we can assume Pioneer 10 isn't running Windows 68... That could explain the probe disappearances: maybe NASA is running Windows CE or NT Embedded on the new projects (just like the ISS). Every time one gets close to the surface of some distant planet, it gets a BSOD.

    "HAL, copy music!"

    "I'm sorry, Dave, you know I cannot copy music that the RIAA doesn't say you own."

  • uhh, have you ever worked for a software company? Have you ever looked at their code? In all the companies I've worked in they have had coding standards. You submit code to be reviewed that isn't up to the coding standard (that means, is not clear enough, does not have sensible comment blocks, does not do what it is supposed to do, does not have the proper asserts and safety checks in it, etc) and your code gets rejected. You have to fix the shit before you submit.

    Well in all companies I've worked at - Fortune 500 ones - the inhouse software *is* crap and poorly written. They do nothing like what you say above. Standards are usually left to the particular programmer, if they have any, and thus most programs have many "standards" in them.

  • Well, its not like the microwave background, residual background noise from the big bang, which was x-ray's and gamma rays but has red shifted into the microwave band over the past what 16-17 billion years? But it is a substancial ammount of shifting when you take into account that it is a human trasmission. Its nothing huge, like solar masses moving away from us that are halfway accross the galaxy, but it is enough to basically garbal the transmission. But its fixable. So, I guess I should say, "Red shifted enough to be annoying," When it becomes untranslatable, then we'll talk about "beyond belief." ;-)
  • Shortly after Mars Climate Observer [nasa.gov] disappeared, we had a good presentation at Orange County Astronomers [chapman.edu] from someone from JPL [nasa.gov]. He talked some about what they believed went wrong, and more in general about the reliability - cost tradeoffs.

    The premise is that on one had they can build spacecraft cheap (relatively), and have much or most of them not work. Or spend vast amounts of money checking and rechecking everything, and desining in tons of reliability, then they'd still only reach the reliability of the launch vehicle itself, so they'd still lose 1 in 20 or so.

    Their studies had concluded that to get the most amount of science done for a given amount of money spent, they should expect to lose about 1 in 5 spacecraft. Pretty close to what has actually happened.

  • All your...

    Ahhhh... forget it
  • Enough already with the AYB
  • They Don't build em like they used to...

    Now don't go sending any LADA's into space ya hear?

  • You know, the usual health monitors .... Fan 1 and two RPM indicators, CPU and case temperature, plus voltage indicators.
  • How can you defend this?

    "Slashdotters, engage in some honest self-assessment before you dispute this. Can you code, or should you maybe keep your mouth shut about this?"

    I can code.

    "And just how much of a typical linux distro can you defend as useful?"

    For me? About 500 megs of Debian. The rest I don't install.

    "Linux today is turning rapidly into what windows was four or five years ago."

    Support? Any at all? How do you justify this?

    "Windows, in case you haven't looked in the last four or five years (and those still claiming it crashes all the time obviously haven't), is getting better."

    I am sometimes forced to use Windows for some things and it still disgusts me. It is wasteful, unstable, slow, unconfigurable, and incompatible.
  • control: pioneer 10 come in
    pioneer: control, this is pioneer 10
    control: young man where have you been?
    pioneer: um... I was just out with some friends honest
    control: young man if it weren't for your being 7 billion miles away I'd ground you.
  • Thanks to Google Cache [google.com] it's still available on the web.

    (It's very late - I wasn't expecting the /. effect right now...does /. have server log data pubished anywhere? I'd love to see the time summaries...)

  • I have this SF story arc floating around in my head -- two hundred years from now we figure out how to send things faster than light. So we send a probe to a nearby planet, turn around, and wait for the transmissions to start to show up from ten years in the future...

    Cheers to NASA, though. May Pioneer continue.

    /Brian
  • Okay, how's this...

    I worked on a project a year and a half ago (VB development -- I was slumming) where a lot of the back-end code was in Cobol (didn't have to deal with that myself) and had no coding standards to speak of. Even better, the VB code I was dealing with was cookie-cutter code based on the work of someone else who seemed to have a pathological fear of writing comments.

    Didn't help me with my VB much, and it's something of a joke to say I know anything about programming the AS/400 -- I got more information on the system by playing with the generic GUI front end than I did writing the code that talked to the database directly.

    /Brian
  • There is significant difference in engineering a device to fly through deep space, and a device you wish to continue to function AFTER it has been thrown at a planet's surface... How many G's has Pioneer been subjected to since it was launched?
  • What I find really fascinating is that the radio waves that it sends back are red shifted beyond belief by the time they reach us.

    Exsqueeze me? According to the Excite article, Pioneer 10 is travelling at 27,380 miles per hour relative to the sun. According to my calculations, this is about 0.00004 c. Enough to measurably red-shift the transmission, yes, barely. Hardly "red shifted beyond belief."

  • I did a google search

    These both have mention of it, i'm sure you can find more with a better search

    http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/03/02/venerab le .probes/
    http://www.spaceviews.com/1999/11/09c.html
  • I seem to remember, maybe from a /. article, that only about half our Martian probes have been successful. So, bash the computer programmers all ya want, but lay off the Martian probes.
  • "It's mission is OVER. Yeah, it's way out there, but aside from communicating with the spacecraft just for the sake of communicating with it, who cares if we never hear from it again?" I feel the same way about my old girlfriends.

  • Re:29 years and no crash? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30, 2001 @12:27AM (#256958)
    Yes, but the Operating System on Voyager 10 is unlikely to be doing preemptive multitasking and multi user logins on remote ttys while someone tries to compile the latest Mozilla nightly.

    I.E, it only has a fixed set of tasks to run, and it can be tuned to do those tasks extremly well because of it.

  • And Pioneer 6? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30, 2001 @02:35AM (#256959)
    "NASA's oldest operating spacecraft is Pioneer 6, which
    scientists contacted in December to mark the 35th anniversary of
    its launch."

    So how far is Pioneer 6 away?

  • The Pioneer's Last Words... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29, 2001 @09:36PM (#256960)
    ..for great justice...

  • Re:sign of the times (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:51PM (#256961)
    The reason that pioneer is still going while many modern probes fail is that pioneer is a whole different beast.

    It costs roughly 20 times as much, has a larger support crew, wieghs a godawful amount and everything is quad redundancy. Todays probes are cheap and quick, built with off the shelf parts and aren't as redundant, but do as good or better science. So if a couple fail its not a problem from the scientific comunities point of view

  • And what did it say? (Score:3)

    by bjb ( 3050 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @03:47AM (#256962) Homepage Journal
    And what did the probe say?

    "Something big is going to happen... something wonderful!"

    (ok, maybe not quite the scene from 2001, but what the heck...)

    --

  • It's easy to look at the hundreds of crappy open source projects and deduce that open source software sucks in general, but they're *visible*. You don't see the bad code in proprietary software, you just swear at Bill Gates and reboot.

    uhh, have you ever worked for a software company? Have you ever looked at their code? In all the companies I've worked in they have had coding standards. You submit code to be reviewed that isn't up to the coding standard (that means, is not clear enough, does not have sensible comment blocks, does not do what it is supposed to do, does not have the proper asserts and safety checks in it, etc) and your code gets rejected. You have to fix the shit before you submit. Maybe this isn't so of the little dot commy startups that dont have a single senior programmer, but most companies who actually make money off their software have a level of quality that is way beyond the junk you find on source forge or even in the linux kernel. You wont find comments like /* I knew what I was doing when I coded this */ in the middle of a function that just failed and you wont find incoherient blocks of code written by someone who didn't give you his email address before you commited it to your tree.

    On the other hand, perhaps open source has something to offer, even if it is just a cheap way to exploit programmers.

  • Re:Quantity/quality tradeoff is deliberate. (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @07:36AM (#256964)
    > Efficiency vs effectiveness

    Amen. The way I had it explained to me was to imagine the world's most efficient WW2 bomber pilot given a mission: to make one flight with 16 bombs and blow up a all the ball bearing factories along the Rhine.

    He got himself over the first target, aimed, and let fly with one bomb ('cuz he was so good that he doesn't need to carpet-bomb the whole city). The bomb hit the target he aimed at - a civilian's house ten blocks away from the ball bearing factory. He flew onward, aiming at a house 5 blocks away from the power plant, and drops another one, blowing the house to smithereens. He continued until he ran out of bombs, having hit every target he aimed at. 15 houses, and one cow standing in a field, just for a lark.

    One bomb, one kill.

    100% efficiency -- and totally ineffective.

  • Re:Quantity/quality tradeoff is deliberate. (Score:3)

    by Y-Leen ( 84208 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @12:47AM (#256965)
    It was faster, better, cheaper and the Mars probes were part of them - Efficiency vs effectiveness [govexec.com]

  • Re: off topic crap (was:Oh, puleeez) (Score:3)

    by PerlGeek ( 102857 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @04:12AM (#256966)
    I don't pay much attension to the code behind the scenes, but the OSS that I've used has been sometimes a lot worse, and sometimes a lot better than the CSS I've used. Most of the time it's about the same. However, there are four major areas where OSS is far better than CSS.

    1: Practical. Updates and upgrades actually help. They fix bugs and improve performance. OSS projects start out worse than CSS ones, and then they get better.

    2: Emotional. No legal threats in the software license. I don't like threats.

    3: Ethical. It's free (as in beer) quite often. CSS is also sometimes free as in beer, but it's very rarely if ever free as in speech. I like being free, and I like supporting people who want me to be free.

    4: Customizable. You can take apart an OSS program and change it in any way you want. I like control of my computer. I don't like giving corporations control of my computer.

    "On the other hand, perhaps open source has something to offer, even if it is just a cheap way to exploit programmers."

    Troll.

  • 29 years and no crash? (Score:3)

    by fractaltiger ( 110681 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @11:00PM (#256967) Journal
    I both senses of the word! Suppose that it doesn't have an OS and hardware can control the craft with 29 year uptime ... there's still the problem of collisions with objects going at 20K mph or the risk of falling into an unknown planet.
    I still get the feeling that nasa shouldn't be that far ahead of us in technology to have planed such a clean launch and trajectory when chaos theory says a dust spec could drastically modify the path in the long run.

    Dust, gravity and heat could affect Pioneer's path. Compound that trajectory deviation 29 years and it should land millions of miles away from its destination ( Unless space is mostly void and gravity less) Granted, the craft has no specific destination but I'd think something would have crossed its path by now.

  • Re:Not Applicable (Score:3)

    by connorbd ( 151811 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @12:55PM (#256968) Homepage
    Meantime there is such a thing as a (nearly) unbreakable reactor, but they all have the same problem: meltdown-proof or not, the ash from that furnace is the single nastiest cleanup job in existence...

    /Brian

  • Cool, But So What? (Score:3)

    by PingXao ( 153057 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @09:42PM (#256969)
    ending fears that the robotic probe had gone silent

    It's mission is OVER. Yeah, it's way out there, but aside from communicating with the spacecraft just for the sake of communicating with it, who cares if we never hear from it again? I could understand "fear" over losing contact with a craft still carrying out its mission, but this is nonsense. How would you like to be Larry Lasher? The "Project Manager". Hah, that's a good one.

  • Re:job security (Score:3)

    by kruczkowski ( 160872 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @11:22PM (#256970) Homepage
    Hi honey, What did you do at work today?

    Oh nothing much, samething I do everyday, try to contact that damn probe...

  • Re:29 years and no crash? (Score:3)

    by dnh ( 210171 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @06:53AM (#256971)
    Not that long ago they had to shut down the computers for a course readjustment.

    Stuff has crossed its path, past pluto it was acted on by a gravitational force of something unknown, probably a pluto like semi planet that has never been seen, this after crossing the astroid belt, and surviving all the planets which it went near. It really has had an interesting life.

  • HAL9000 (Score:3)

    by noz ( 253073 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:18PM (#256972)
    I feared it was a HAL9000 derivative, but it must've made a mistake in thinking the transmission device was damaged. But no 9000 series computer has ever made a mistake... But then, it's not powered by IBM. : )
  • What kind of sensors/tech are on this thing? And what kind of data can they get from it? It'd just be interesting to get any sort of data from that for away, no matter how trivial.

  • Re:And Pioneer 6? (Score:3)

    by Turq ( 319326 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @05:54AM (#256974) Homepage
    Pioneer 6 isn't all that far away, because it's in orbit around the sun, instead of heading out. I'm not sure of the exact details of the orbit.

  • No, definitely Jupiter. (Score:3)

    by Flying Headless Goku ( 411378 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:31PM (#256975) Homepage
    With a nice engraving of giant dirgible squids, and compliments on their wonderful microscopes for being able to see the markings.

    That way, not only can we have a bunch of giant H-bombs floating in Jupiter's atmosphere to turn it into one huge H-bomb and wipe out their whole invading force in one trap, but we will be immune to their carefully tuned poke-pop technology (aside from the occasional blimp).
    --

  • Re:Pioneer (Score:3)

    by lobsterGun ( 415085 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @02:55AM (#256976)
    > ...before they find out and blow our asses. I think you meant "before they find out and blow our asses AWAY."

    ... unless the aliens came from planet pornstar or something.

  • Re:Oh, puleeez (Was: Re:sign of the times) (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29, 2001 @11:18PM (#256977)
    I have 16 years experience is software QA for defense contractors. I can pick up any file from any "Open Source" operating system or software package, and I can find a dozen defects without trying. Most "Open Source" software is so bad it hurts to look at it. Mind you, there is a lot of shitty source code in the commercial world too. But most defense projects have higher standards, and that is to what I'm accustomed. What I see in Open Source is really bad from a QA point of view.

  • Re:29 years and no crash? (Score:4)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @01:16AM (#256978) Homepage
    The people doing the orbit calcuations did them by hand with a slide rule. The high priced nasa computers were just used to veryify the results. Odd thing is that in many places they just used 3 as a value for pi.

    I used to know some of the people that built the thing. I even saw it launch. It was quite impressive. It seems that the probe out lasted many of the workers that built it.

  • Re:Holy Crap! (Score:4)

    by intmainvoid ( 109559 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:59PM (#256979)
    in space there is nothing to slow down the signal

    The signal travels at the speed of light, and that 's all there is to it. What counts is how strong the signal is compared to the background noise.

  • job security (Score:4)

    by krokodil ( 110356 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:19PM (#256980) Homepage

    The spacecraft was launched March 2, 1972.
    ...
    "Pioneer 10 lives on," project manager Larry Lasher said in a status report posted Sunday on the mission's Web site.


    So, the guy was project manager for this since
    1972. They kept project open all this years
    expecting to reestablish contact with spacecraft again.

    This is nice idea for job security. Send
    something into the space and wait for
    30 years to hear back from it.

  • Holy Crap! (Score:4)

    by enneff ( 135842 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:14PM (#256981) Homepage
    "Picking out the faint signal of the spacecraft's eight-watt transmitter..."

    What the hell?! Eight-watt is absolutely miniscule. Does anyone else find this absolutely amazing that such a tiny signal could be picked up from billions of miles away?

    Considering that a 10-watt FM transmitter I was playing with barely travelled a couple of km, this just blows my mind. (sure, it should be considered that this was on Earth where there is a lot of radio noise, but still...)

  • 29 years! (Score:4)

    by temp0 ( 170834 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @09:43PM (#256982)
    29 years! And I thought I was impressed with my linux box's uptime...

  • Amazing stuff (Score:4)

    by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:50PM (#256983) Homepage
    What is really incredible is that we can hear it at all. It uses a 8-watt transmitter to get back to us.

    Just to put that in perspective, park your car in a big flat empty carpark or field at night. Switch on the sidelights (these are about 5w each). Stand as far away as you can, and see how bright they are.
    Now stand 7 billion miles away...

  • Old tech vs new tech (Score:4)

    by bl968 ( 190792 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @11:06PM (#256984) Journal
    Old tech lasts longer for one reason and one reason only. The engineers designed it to last. Corporations do not make money off hardware that lasts 29+ years. They make money when the same hardware has to be purchased repeatedly every couple of years. How would you like to have an automobile with 5 million miles on the odometer and several million miles remaining? Could this be done? Of course, it could however the automobile makers would not be nearly as "Profitable" as they are with the current disposable product manufacturing system.

    Do I see any change on this in the future? I do not see it as very likely. Unless it pays them for it to last for a long period, they will build in a short duration life. Yes I truly believe they program products with a built in time bomb to cause it to stop functioning after a defined period. Is this right? Not on your life.

    How can you change this? I no longer think that it is possible to change it. You are trained to buy the same defective products repeatedly. Engineers are trained to design it to break down by reflex. So we are stuck in the proverbial rut.


    --
    When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run :P

  • Round Trip (Score:4)

    by Squigley ( 213068 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:00PM (#256985) Homepage
    The spacecraft is currently 7.29 billion miles from Earth, traveling at 27,380 mph relative to the sun. At that distance, radio signals take 21 hours and 45 minutes to make the roundtrip between the Earth and the spacecraft.

    $ping pioneer10

    Pinging pioneer10 with 32 bytes of data:

    Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128
    Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128
    Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128
    Reply from pioneer10: bytes=32 time=78300000ms TTL=128

    Ping statistics for pioneer10:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
    Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 78300000ms, Maximum = 78300000ms, Average = 78300000ms

    Apologies fo trying to pass a W2000 ping as coming from a real machine, I'm at work atm.

  • Pioneer (Score:4)

    by iomud ( 241310 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @09:44PM (#256986) Homepage Journal
    The spacecraft carries a gold plaque engraved with a message of goodwill and a map showing the Earth's location within the solar system.

    I don't know how I feel about that. What if it crashes into someones house or car or something, do we really want a map that shows where it came from? Or worse we'll be known as planet "goodwill" and other civilizations will send their broken tv's, old matresses and assorted moth ridden clothing.

  • Re:What kind of sensors/tech is on this thing? (Score:4)

    by Draghkar ( 262216 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:06PM (#256987)
    Pioneer 10's position outside the solar system is a rather unique one, which allows it to give us direct indications of what its local environment in extrasolar/interstellar space is like. It has instruments like a plasma analyzer and ion detector which give us a detailed picture of the constituents of the nearby space. Also, it has micrometeorite detectors which can indicate whether there are any outside the solar system, and if so, how far away.

    After all, although we think we know what's out there between the stars, we have very little direct evidence. That's an especially important issue nowadays because of indications that the expansion of the universe is accelerating -- there must be something out there generating the negative pressure (which effectively produces the opposite of gravity)!

  • Re: Holy Crap! (Score:4)

    by Caid Raspa ( 304283 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:33PM (#256988)
    Considering that a 10-watt FM transmitter I was playing with barely travelled a couple of km, this just blows my mind. (sure, it should be considered that this was on Earth where there is a lot of radio noise, but still...) There sure is loads of radio noise on Earth. A cellphone in the moon would be the one of the brightest extraterrestrial radio sources.

  • Not Applicable (Score:4)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @08:21AM (#256989)
    Space probes use radioisotope thermal generators. These are not anything like a fission reactor. RTGs are horribly inefficient and filled with isotopes even more dangerous than normal nuclear fuel or waste. IIRC, it takes something like several ounces of an especially nasty plutonium isotope to generate just 1000 watts of electricity.

    That's why certain alarmists were up in arms over the Cassini probe's earth flyby. (What if it were to crash? Better re-check those metric conversions.) You've got to take some risks in life to get ahead; one space probe is OK.

    However, you'd have to give every citizen their own personal RTG to generate enough power to make a difference. Each one of those could probably contaminate a whole city if it were to break open. Each one will be too hot to touch for a hundred years or more. The whole USA only has enough isotopes to build a couple more of these right now.

    Unfortunately, your example of Pioneer 10 proves nothing about nuclear power in general.

  • Re:Pioneer (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29, 2001 @09:59PM (#256990)
    do we really want a map that shows where it came from?

    These NASA people have no sense of humor. They should have engraved a map showing the MOON's location. When we see thousands of independence day sized saucers surrounding the Moon, at least we can say "GOTCHA" and have a short laugh before they find out and blow our asses.

  • See folks? Nuclear power WORKS! (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30, 2001 @05:00AM (#256991)
    Pioneer wouldn't have lasted this long on solar or gas or petroleum or any other type of fuel. 30 years. No meltdowns. Zero emmissions. And the tiny craft still has power. Are we learning anything, California?

  • Pay lip service to quality then buy on price (Score:5)

    by Wansu ( 846 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @04:50AM (#256992)
    Several posts have pointed out that there's been a trend toward using off the shelf components and playing the numbers game on probes. I'm not so sure that strategy has been accompanied by a lowering of expectations of performance. People seemed agast when the last several probes didn't work as expected. Missions like Pioneer 10 were designed with the mindset that failure was not an option. I used to work for the company that designed and built Pioneer 10's DC-DC power converters. The engineering model is still on display there. Nothing was left to chance in it's design and it has performed flawlessly. No news is good news. This company moved into industiral products where it has had some very modest success in a few niche markets but these guys were never able to crack the market for PC power supplies where you sell for 20 cents per watt. They just don't have the mindset to design and build stuff that way and the market has selected against them. Time after time, they would find that comapanies would pay lip service to quality then buy on price and play the numbers game with components. At $30, nobody thinks twice about swapping out a power supply if they suspect it to be malfunctioning. Then they toss the old one. Expectations of power supply reliability are lower too. If we're going to play the numbers game with space and we're not willing to pay the price for a 99.9999% chnace of success, we can't be too shocked when missions fail.

  • So what? (Score:5)

    by Croaker ( 10633 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @05:36AM (#256993)
    Gee, I guess this is why I have a 20 year old computer that still works, a color TV that has freakin' *dials* on it (and was made in the US... so it's very old) and a bunch of other elderly equipment around. All of which still works.

    Remember that for electronics, it is far more often the case that the non-mechanical parts of the equipment far outlast their useful lifetime. We have mounds and mounds of still functional, but fairly useless electronics gear.

    As for the mechanical world, I highly doubt they are designed to fall apart at a certain time. It's just not a design goal that these things should be indestructable. Maybe they could be designed to last forever. I kinda doubt you could build machines that would be capable of running 5 million miles without massive overhauls. And the price of constructing a car out of nearly wear-proof parts would make them hideously expensive. No matter how clever your engineering, you still have to face the simple fact that there is friction, and friction causes wear. For most cars, you can keep them going nearly indefinitely, if you are willing to spend the cash to keep them going. But why bother? Most people don't bother maintaining their cars properly anyhow, then bitch when the thing breaks down.

    You're measuring a space probe that is travelling through a near vaccuum, with few mechanical parts that still need to work, to cars that drive through highly corrosive road salt, over pot-hole filled streets, by fairly neglectful owners. And you're wondering why the probe wins out? Oh, and have you checked the price of a space probe vs. the price of a car recently?

  • Quantity/quality tradeoff is deliberate. (Score:5)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:05PM (#256994)
    That's pretty cute... this thing we threw up there *twenty nine years ago* is still working, but the last couple probes we've slapped together can't even make it to the next planet.

    You're overlooking the several probes that did work. Clementine was particularly interesting (lunar mapping probe).

    That aside - this was a deliberate tradeoff. If you send out ten probes instead of one, it doesn't matter if only half work - you've still have five times as many probes out there as you otherwise would. This is the philosophy behind the "smaller, faster, cheaper" motto that Nasa has adopted.

    Not sure if the Mars probes were officially part of this program or not.

  • Re:Solar wind studies (Score:5)

    by nuintari ( 47926 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @02:38AM (#256995) Homepage
    As far as I know, the magnetometer is the only instrument on it still running. Everything else on it has been shut down to conserve power.

    What I find really fascinating is that the radio waves that it sends back are red shifted beyond belief by the time they reach us. And with the earth's rotation around the sun, sometimes we are actually catching up with the probe, and sometimes were running away from it very quickly. So, there is no set mathetmatical formula to run the signal through and get it at the state it was in when the probe sent it. They have to run it through a bunch of variables just to understand what it sent back.

    Take that into account, and the fact that modern computer's are too complex to talk to this thing (I think its on board "computer" has an instruction set of like, FOUR), and you have a technological marvel at work. Detecting the heiopause is cool, but I think that we can still use it at all is just fascinating and validates the project itself.

    And for those of you who don't care, Nasa doesn't fund this anymore so its not costing you tax money. Its all volunteer driven, so quit complaining.

  • Sure there is! (Score:5)

    by devphil ( 51341 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:27PM (#256996) Homepage
    There's probably no data worth anything it will ever send back again.

    Except for, "I'm 7 billion miles away AND STILL FUNCTIONING! Kiss my low-tech metallic ASS, you planned-obsolesence designers!"

    The simple fact of its existence is enough to keep reminding ourselves that Americans used to know how to make things that went the distance. Now we make things cheaply, quickly, and crappily, and we do it on purpose.

  • Re:Cool, But So What? (Score:5)

    by jmp ( 84073 ) <(ua.di.sttipnhoj) (ta) (nhoj)> on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:01PM (#256997) Homepage

    Well if you were to read the Pioneer web page [nasa.gov] that was linked in the article, you'd know that

    The Pioneer 10 weak signal continues to be tracked by the DSN as part of a new advanced concept study of chaos theory.

    I'm not sure what that means, but it looks like they are tracking it for a reason!

  • Re:NASA's site /.'ed (Score:5)

    by rjamestaylor ( 117847 ) <rjamestaylor@gmail.com> on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:06PM (#256998) Journal
    D*mn. Screwed up the URL (editing out irrelevant info and I forgot a stray &). Second try:
    Thanks to
    Google Cache [google.com] it's still available on the web.

    (It's very late - I wasn't expecting the /. effect right now...does /. have server log data pubished anywhere? I'd love to see the time summaries...)

  • Re:Cool, But So What? (Score:5)

    by Explo ( 132216 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @11:10PM (#256999)
    Yes, the actual mission is over. So? With the same logic we should dump everything that is no longer in actual use, even if the item in question has some novelty value. I'd guess that museums would cease to exist rather soon. ;) Checking for its state should not take much resources if done once in a few months. And personally, I'm curious to see how long it is going to function and how far to get before contact is lost, even if that doesn't give much actual new and useful information.

  • Re:What kind of sensors/tech is on this thing? (Score:5)

    by PingXao ( 153057 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @09:59PM (#257000)
    There was some talk of trying to detect the heliopause. That's the purported "boundary" of our solar system, past which the sun has no measurable bearing or effect on anything that lies beyond. The bit rate when communication does take place is in the single-digit range, I believe. There's probably no data worth anything it will ever send back again.

    It was instrumented up for exploration of the outer planets. Unless it passes some large planet or other celestial body it's not going to perform any more meaningful tasks. This link describes the mission and instruments it carries. A quick list:
    • Helium Vector Magnetometer
    • Plasma Analyzer
    • Charged Particle Instrument
    • Cosmic Ray Telescope
    • Geiger Tube Telescope
    • Trapped Radiation Detector
    • Meteoroid Detector
    • Asteroid-Meteoroid Experiment
    • Ultraviolet Photometer
    • Imaging Photopolarimeter
    • Infrared Radiometer
    Other than the cosmic ray telescope none of these are geared towards anything interesting once you get into interplanetary space. Even the valu of that is questionable today since huge strides have been made since 1975 in cosmic ray science.

  • Re:Quantity/quality tradeoff is deliberate. (Score:5)

    by at_18 ( 224304 ) on Monday April 30, 2001 @02:58AM (#257001) Journal
    You're overlooking the several probes that did work. Clementine was particularly interesting (lunar mapping probe).

    Yes, sadly that was only the first part of Clementine's planned mission. The probe was lost before the second part (asteroid fly-by).
    Anyway, it's true that media report ONLY those probes that failed, and keep being silent on the many more that are successful.

    And don't forget that Pioneer, Voyager and co. were hugely expensive at the time. The Voyagers, for example, had three complete systems on board - just to be sure that if one or two failed, the other could keep working. And it worked :-)

  • sign of the times (Score:5)

    by litheum ( 242650 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @09:41PM (#257002)
    That's pretty cute... this thing we threw up there *twenty nine years ago* is still working, but the last couple probes we've slapped together can't even make it to the next planet. i wonder why the tech community in general has become so lax as of late. i read articles about the way people used to write computer programs like badasses making sure every bit was accounted for. now, we don't even learn how to use dynamic memory in our C class. sad, sad times...

  • NEWSFLASH - Pioneer 10 spacecraft contacts NASA (Score:5)

    by Pentapod ( 264636 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:26PM (#257003)

    Last Sunday Pioneer 10 contacted NASA, ending fears that all intelligent life on Earth had been extinguished 29 years into a mission that has left Earth more than 7 billion miles distant.

    A radio antenna on the sunward side received a signal from NASA on Saturday, marking the first time that intelligent life had been contacted since Aug. 24, the air-date of the final 'Survivor' episode. The spacecraft was launched March 2, 1972.

    "Evidently there is still hope," Pioneer 10 subroutine 24A commented to itself during an internal status report on Sunday. "After 7 months of 'Survivor' and 'Big Brother' style programming flooding the airwaves, it was not expected that any intelligent life could survive. Contact with NASA has proved that theory wrong."

    NASA, established October 1, 1958, has for years been considered a haven for intelligent life on Earth. Debate continues between subroutine 3F2 and subroutine A09 over the exact meaning of the received NASA message, "all your base are belong to us".


    ...Pentapod

  • 8W is loud (Score:5)

    by Caid Raspa ( 304283 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @11:54PM (#257004)
    Put that 8W transmitter to 10 million miles from Earth, and it is still among the brightest extraterrestrial radio sources.

    I think the more amazing thing is that Pioneer has still some functioning instruments.

  • Solar wind studies (Score:5)

    by Caid Raspa ( 304283 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:46PM (#257005)
    I think the magnetometer, plasma analyzer and particle instrument woould still yield interesting data. Such as density, chemical composition and magnetic field of the solar wind at large distances from the Sun.

    Without those, you could not detect the heliopause. Heliopause should be a schock where the solar wind hits the interstellar gas and magnetic field. If Pioneer makes it past the heliopause, we have first direct measurements of the properties of interstellar space. There is also lots of complex plasma physics involved in the heliopause itself.

    This will not give any pretty pictures for the general public, but for the more science literate, this might be more interesting.

  • Pioneer is a HPB! Boot him! (Score:5)

    by screwballicus ( 313964 ) on Sunday April 29, 2001 @10:17PM (#257006)
    At that distance, radio signals take 21 hours and 45 minutes to make the roundtrip between the Earth and the spacecraft.

    Seems like every time you join a multiplayer game these days, there has to be ONE extrasolar spacecraft with a ping of 21 hours dragging the rest of the players down.

    How about someone tries to portscan the bastard? At 21 hours a shot We'll have covered Netbios, HTTP and FTP before the month is out.

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