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Space Science

Remembering Pioneer 10 242

Posted by michael from the where-no-man-has-gone-before dept.
Daniel Goldman writes "Twenty one years ago today, Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to leave our solar system, by crossing the orbit of Neptune (which was then the farthest planet from the Sun). Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt, the ring of giant rocks beyond Mars. It survived and zoomed on to Jupiter in late 1973, where it became the first spacecraft to take close-up photographs of the storms on the giant planet's surface. After Jupiter, it kept going, collecting data on the particles and radiation it encountered. More info about Pioneer 10 at Wikipedia."
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Remembering Pioneer 10 More

Remembering Pioneer 10

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  • Leaving the solar system (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jardine ( 398197 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:04PM (#9416152) Homepage
    Twenty one years ago today, Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to leave our solar system, by crossing the orbit of Neptune (which was then the farthest planet from the Sun).

    I guess that depends on where you define the edge of the solar system. What about the Oort Cloud? What about that tenth planet we can never seem to pin down?

    • Re:Leaving the solar system (Score:5, Funny)

      by bobhagopian ( 681765 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:13PM (#9416225)
      That's a very academic question, and although I could launch a debate about what counts as a planet and whether the Oort Cloud is properly part of the Solar System, it all comes down to the very non-scientific and uninteresting issue of definition. The point is this: Pioneer is really, really, really far. Even farther than Canada.
      • Who was it that caused you to write the joke above? It appears that he is a far more interesting person that how you've caricatured him. A quote, a webpage or a name would satisfy me.

    • Re:Leaving the solar system (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:34PM (#9416324)
      Oort cloud is just a theory and unfortunatly has become gospel in the laymen's world.

      AFA, the end of the solar system, the heliopause is a better "backyard fence" as it is the boundry between the solar wind and interstellar space.
    • What about that tenth planet we can never seem to pin down?

      As far as I know, the observed gravitational effects that astronomers had posited a tenth planet to explain, are now believed to be the result of the Kuiper Belt. [google.com]
    • According to the article, they define the edge of the solar system as the heliopause [wikipedia.org].

  • Well, it isn't exactly a dupe (Score:3, Funny)

    by kfg ( 145172 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:04PM (#9416155)
    Because the last time we did this story it was 20 years ago today.

    Happy New Pioneer 10 Year everybody. Whoooooooooo!

    KFG

  • We'll get another chance to remember it... (Score:5, Funny)

    by datastalker ( 775227 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:04PM (#9416156) Homepage
    ...when it returns as V'Ger [imdb.com]. ;)
  • We'll soon be dealing with an unstoppable force known as P'Eer!

  • Long Live Pioneer 10 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NETHED ( 258016 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:06PM (#9416168) Homepage
    Long Live Pioneer 10. It is amazing to think that a human creation has traveled so far and survived so long.

    Built back when things were made to last, Pioneer 10 (according to WiKi) was still used as a training platform just a few years back.

    And the two Mars rovers are a reminder that smart people still are working for NASA, as they have out lasted anyone's prediction.

    Makes me proud /Rant

    • Re:Long Live Pioneer 10 (Score:5, Informative)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:30PM (#9416304)
      For those looking for a more in depth study of the pioneer missions to the outer planets, this [nasa.gov] book published in the late 70's (now fully online) is truly a hidden gem from NASA's site. It details every last design aspect of the spacecraft in extremely high detail [nasa.gov]. We've certianly come a long way in ~30 years from grainy washed out Pioneer photopolarimeter images [nasa.gov] to super high resolution ultrasharp CCD images [nasa.gov] from Cassini.

      • Re:Long Live Pioneer 10 (Score:5, Funny)

        by wideBlueSkies ( 618979 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @10:36PM (#9417160) Journal
        >>We've certianly come a long way in ~30 years from grainy washed out Pioneer photopolarimeter images to super high resolution ultrasharp CCD images from Cassini.

        Hey, there's no stars in those pictures. They must have been taken in a studio out in the Nevada desert. It's a government coverup, I tell ya...

        wbs.
    • It's cool that the Mars rovers have outlived their "planned" missions, but I suspect that those missions have a fair amount of padding built into them, because the last thing you want, from a NASA marketing perspective, is a rover failing before it has completed its mission. So, they set themselves up for these sorts of planned "successes".

      That Pioneer 10 is still going, however, is pretty darn cool. If Spirit is still exploring Mars 30+ years from now, I'll color myself impressed than too.

      • Re:Long Live Pioneer 10 (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Drakin ( 415182 )
        From everything NASa has said, the minimum duration for the Mars rovers to be considered a "sucess" was 90 days.

        It's clear, that like all good engineers, NASA folks designed it to exceed that length of time (who designs to just fit minimum requirements anyway?) if at all possible.

        Will they last 30+ years? Probably not. Given that they do have human input, someone's going to tell a rover to do something stupid, and the rover will do it, dispite it's obstical avoidance software.

        However, hats off to the NAS

      • Re:Long Live Pioneer 10 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by BTWR ( 540147 ) <americangibor3@yah o o . c om> on Sunday June 13, 2004 @10:47PM (#9417205) Homepage Journal
        ...it was only a matter of time...

        ...before some Slashdot reader chalks up the sucess of firing a rocket, sending it millions of miles across space, separating in a dozen stages, landing (which requires maneuvers to be calculated and carried out to the second), setting itself up, finding earth, (refinding earth by itself after losing contact), landing directly bulls-eye within a target picked from hundreds of millions of miles away, finding near PROOF for the first time of the theory of Mars having been water-filled...

        into a "fluffed up" assessment of what success is.

  • Engineering at its finest (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bobhagopian ( 681765 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:08PM (#9416179)
    What's truly amazing about Pioneer and all the other satellites of the era is that they have lasted so far beyond their expected lifetimes. If I remember correctly, Pioneer was supposed to die after reaching the outer planets, but it died in late 2003. The work they do at NASA and especially JPL (where most of the unmanned devices are designed and built) is truly impressive, and even more so considering there usually aren't any second chances available (with the noteworthy exception of Hubble).

  • It's a blast (Score:5, Interesting)

    by after ( 669640 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:08PM (#9416185) Journal
    Funny I was just reading about Pioneer a day ago. The Pioneer Plaque [wikipedia.org] is very interesting to think about... just imagine an extraterrestrial life finally reading this plaque. I can't ever imagine what a super-intelligent race could do with it.

    Just think about it. We think of aliens as being these super intelligent creatures capable of time travel and the ability to travel at the speed of light. We are probably wrong. There are probably races that are millions of times more advanced then or there are races that are millions of times dumber. Then there is that change that the human race is the only one in existence, but then you can start thinking about Multiverse [wikipedia.org].

    It's absolutely mind-boggling about some of the ideas out there. The scary thing is that the reality might be exactly what sci-fi authors are telling us.

    • Re:It's a blast (Score:5, Funny)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:23PM (#9416274)
      I can't ever imagine what a super-intelligent race could do with it.

      I think it would make a dandy TV tray.

      KFG

    • Re:It's a blast (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Temporal ( 96070 )
      It's actually highly unlikely that any race more advanced than us exists in this galaxy. The reason? Well, we are very, very close to the point where we'll be able to send AI-guided probes out into the galaxy at near-light speeds. Logically, if any race even just a bit more advanced than us were living nearby, we'd already be encoutering their probes flying around our system. Crazy conspiracy theories aside, this hasn't happened yet. (And, no, realistically I don't believe aliens would go to all the tr
      • Dude, have you taken a look at Earth lately? If I was a super intelligent alien with 80,000 years greater technology at my fingertips, a galactic slum infested with psychotic and homicidal creatures would probably be dead-last on my "places to visit" list.
        No offense to my fellow earthlings. ;)

      • Re:It's a blast (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pomakis ( 323200 ) <pomakis@pobox.com> on Sunday June 13, 2004 @09:39PM (#9416847) Homepage
        Well, we are very, very close to the point where we'll be able to send AI-guided probes out into the galaxy at near-light speeds. Logically, if any race even just a bit more advanced than us were living nearby, we'd already be encoutering their probes flying around our system.

        So you're saying that we're "very, very close" to having the technology to send a probe to each of the several billion star systems in our galaxy? Let me tell ya, bub, we're nowhere near that, by a long shot! Sure, I'm willing to believe that within the next hundred years or so we'll probably have the technology be able to whip a probe off somewhere at near light speed. But a few billion? Just where do you think we're going to get the raw materials for this project? And the energy? And the political willpower?

        Also, you're assuming that any civilization that happens to evolve to that level of intelligence and skill will necessarily want to make contact via physical probes (which further assumes that they're interested in making contact at all, which is another matter entirely). It seems more likely to me that in the interests of practicality, sending messages via electromagnetic waves or some other form of ether would be the more common way to reach out to the rest of the galaxy. And as far as we know, there may be several of these messages hitting our humble little planet as we speak. SETI has thus far barely touched the surface in its attempt to scan the heavens at the various likely frequencies looking for such messages.

        (As an aside, lets assume for the moment that we may actually be the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy at the moment. There are still billions of other galaxies out there that may also contain intelligent life. Unfortunately, the distances we're talking about here are so incredibly vast (way vaster than the already-mindboglingly vast distances between the stars in our own galaxy), that the chances of ever knowing whether intelligent life exists (or had ever existed) in another galaxy is pretty much zero. Pretty depressing, really.)

        • Re:It's a blast (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Temporal ( 96070 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @10:06PM (#9416998) Journal
          Uh... No, we are not going to produce a billion of them. We will produce a handful and send them to the nearest stars. They will then replicate themselves using raw materials available at those stars and move on. Remember, each of these things will be loaded with an AI much more intelligent than any human. And, frankly, with the exponential rate of advancement we are experiencing, we will have such AI within a half-century... probably 25 years. See Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiratual Machines for some pretty convincing math to back up these predictions.

          But, even if you don't believe that... Do you think we'll have such technology within 10,000 years? Because even 10,000 years is a lot less that 80,000 years, and could still be considered "very, very close" when compared with the five billion years we've spent evolving.

          And, yes, I am assuming that any civilization with the ability to do so will want to explore the galaxy physically, not just sit back and watch it. I don't think that's such a stretch.

      • Re:It's a blast (Score:3, Insightful)

        by servoled ( 174239 )
        Logically speaking you have commited an appeal to ignorance fallacy [fallacyfiles.org]. Just because we have not seen any probes flying around our solar system does not mean that more intelligent life does not exist somewhere out there. Hell, it doesn't even mean that the existance of more intelligent life is "highly unlikely". All it means is that we have a question for which we have no confirmed answer.

        • Re:It's a blast (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Temporal ( 96070 )
          An appeal to ignorance fallacy looks like this:

          1. There is no evidence to support p.
          2. Therefore, not p.

          My argument looks like this:

          1. If p, then event e would necessarily occur.
          2. If event e occured, we would necessarily observe it.
          3. We have not observed event e.
          4. Therefore, not p.

          There's a huge difference between these two arguments. The latter is valid, but the former is not.

          • Re:It's a blast (Score:3, Insightful)

            by servoled ( 174239 )
            An argument of that form would be valid, however your first assumption is false. The existance of more intelligent life does not require that the more intelligent life would necessarily attempt to contact us. They could very will just observere us from afar or ignore us completely. Also, depending on how you define event e, we might not necessarily observer it.

            As originally presented you did not specifically say the first two assumptions, so just looking at 3 and 4, it looks like an appeal to ignorance
      • Their probe for our system arrived 100,000 years ago and crashed into Jupiter 1875. Whatcha gonna do?

    • Re:It's a blast (Score:5, Funny)

      by Robber Baron ( 112304 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @09:00PM (#9416707) Homepage
      ... just imagine an extraterrestrial life finally reading this plaque. I can't ever imagine what a super-intelligent race could do with it.

      I can. They'd finally be able to figure out where the source of all that free porn spam is located!
    • Here's a stupid question. Hopefully someone knows the answer to this, because it's something i've never understood.
      How the hell is this [wikipedia.org] supposed to tell aliens just where the fsck that little tin can of ours came from?! Ok, obviously the picture at the bottom has the sun, the planets, and a big friggin arrow that should be rather obvious. But what in gods name is all that other stuff? Whats that burst-like thing supposed to be? A dogs butthole? Or what about the sideways parachute? Or the goofy looking gla

      • Re:Thats a map? (Score:3, Informative)

        by pussycat ( 206606 )
        No, it's more like an address. [worldhistory.com] Basically, the lines represent the period of a bunch of different pulsars and their distance from our sun. The idea is that if E.T. happens to know three (I think) or more of these pulsars, and happens to read binary, he might go "aha!" and find us and steal our water and/or women.

      • Re:Thats a map? (Score:3, Informative)

        by CaptBubba ( 696284 )
        The upper right hand two-ball thing represents the spin-flip transition of hydrogen. Basically the electron can either be in a spin-up or spin down configuration, and there is a certain probablity/time and wavelength of the photon produced when the electron "flips". Notice there is a little "1" there, this is used as a unit of measure for the rest of the engraving.

        The spin-flip transition has a wavelength of 21cm. Next to the people is the binary number 8, 8x21=168cm, the approximate height of a human.

      • Maybe when we get *really* desperate to find alien life, we will start packaging a "Faster than Light Airship HOWTO" on the side of every space probe. That'll get the stupid ones off their asses.

    • I've never ever seen anyone think about this, but...



      What if we're the first?


      Somebody had to be first.. why not us?

  • details about cameras (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Did they use CCD's? How did cameras on board space probes work back then?

    Anyone know .. I think Voyager did use CCD's.

    • Vidicons where used back then. It was a real challenge to get images of the outer panels (poor lighting) with them. Galilieo was the first probe to use a CCD before that it all in the tube domain. In a related matter I actually have an old Vidicon Camera in my closet. Its a Model XL-1, I am tempted to list the old security camera on ebay with only the title XL-1 Camera, works great!
    • Some spacecraft used vidicon tubes (what was used in video cameras before) and others used photomultipliers with mechanical scanning. Some spy satellites even just record on actual film which is later recovered. I don't know what Pioneer used.

    • Re:details about cameras (Score:5, Interesting)

      by buckminsterinsd ( 652732 ) <buckminster@ad[ ]hia.net ['elp' in gap]> on Sunday June 13, 2004 @08:18PM (#9416537)
      Actually it didn't have a digital camera.

      Pioneer 10/11 were spin-stabilizied spacecrafts. With each revolution there was a light sensitive aperture assembly that generated a scanline. The scanlines were reassembled dirtside to create the image. When Pioneer 11 reached Saturn it moving so fast that the raw planet image was shaped like a football. These raw images were sent to the Univ. of Arizona in real-time for correction. Now, we'd just use Photoshop or whatever but in 1979 that sorta image enhancement was really state of the art.

      Yeah, Pioneer was primitive compared to Voyager but it did more basic science. Voyager was mostly just an expensive ass camera platform. Good for PR mostly.

      Looking back on my 30 years as a geek, working on Pioneer was the most fun job I ever had.

      buck
      • Seeing that it looks like you know quite a bit about pioneer and I can not find much about the sub systems online I have a question: What is going on with the Pioneer 10/11. I know that RTG wattage is to low to power the transmitter, but is there any part of it that is still 'on'? Also, I am under the impression that in all odds its did not fly with an onboard computer so some sort of logic based control system was used. Mind telling me a little about how the system opperated and how data was stored and

  • Dont you watch star trek? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sophrosyne ( 630428 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:12PM (#9416212) Homepage
    Everyone knows that pioneer 10 was destroyed by Klingons in some harmless target practice!

  • Uh, no... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:23PM (#9416272)
    The edge of the solar system is the heliopause. Pioneer 10 has not gotten close to that. The honor of the first man-made object to leave the solar system belongs to Voyager 1, launched over 25 years ago.

    • Re:Uh, no... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13, 2004 @08:21PM (#9416545)
      Actually, there's not much evidence that Voyager 1 ever passed the heliopause. About half-a-year ago, there were reports that Voyager 1 detected a sudden drop in the velocity of the solar wind, but it was extremely short lived and could have been due to problems with the recorder/computer. One group claimed this was evidence Voyager 1 passed the heliopause, but two other scientific groups said that it had not. At any rate, all groups agreed that after that drop (if it even had occured) Voyager 1 was definitely now within the heliopause. (Keep in mind the distance to the heliopause can vary greatly over time, depending on how active the Sun is.)

      Voyager 1 is at about 91 AU right now from the Sun (that's 91 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth--one AU is 93 million miles). Pioneer 10 is nowhere near that far. The heliopause is thought to average 120 AU from the Sun. So, Voyager 1 probably has about 10-15 years of travel left to go to definitely leave our solar system and reach interstellar space--defined as where the electromagnetic forces of the galaxy as a whole (the interstellar winds) have more influence than the electromagnetic forces of our Sun (solar wind).

      Interestingly enough, Voyager 1 has about 14-16 years left of electricity (from its nuclear generator) to run its scientific instruments and communications. If the heliopause is more than 120 AU out there, Voyager 1 will pass into interstellar space eventually, but Voyager might be a dead hunk o' metal and we may not get any info about the event.

      • Re:Uh, no... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Bad D.N.A. ( 753582 ) <baddna@gmaiIIIl.com minus threevowels> on Sunday June 13, 2004 @09:37PM (#9416840)
        The more you understand the observations the more compelling the evidence is and there was certainly no problem with any of the relevent systems. In addition the time period you refer to was certainly not short lived. The duration was on the order of months. The solar wind instrument on V1 failed a long time ago so there is no direct observations of the solar wind available. However, energetic particles also sense the solar wind and these particles are measured. The solar wind velocity can be determined from the particle anisotropies because of the compton-getting effect, to within around 20%. And it's the observations and analysis of these particles that is at the source of the reports. There is certainly no agrement on this issue yet but it is an extremely active area of research.

        What is sad about this whole issue is that after a very long mission and the first real interesting observations in a very long time both V1 and V2 are in jeprody of being shut off by NASA. The presedential proposal to go to mars is not being funded at all at this point and therefore to fund the beginning phases of this effort the necessary funding to these (and many more) missions may be cut. But I guess thats typical government waste... Send the damn things out to 90 AU and then turn them off for political reasons, just when things are getting interesting.
      • I don't think it was ever claimed that Voyager has reached the heliopause. They claimed it has reached the inside of the termination shock [nasa.gov] boundary which is expected to take a couple of years to traverse. After which, the craft will be considered to be inside the heliosheath [nasa.gov] which itself may take several years to pass, where it will only then reach the healiopause and transfer into true interstellar space.

  • Asteroids! Watch out!! (Score:5, Informative)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:44PM (#9416368) Homepage
    ... first spacecraft to enter the asteroid belt, the ring of giant rocks beyond Mars. It survived ...

    Contrary to nearly every science fiction chase scene, the asteroid belt in orbit around our star is hardly what anyone would call dense. It "survived"? Heck, it'd have to try pretty hard to hit a rock out there!

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:55PM (#9416423)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Asteroids! Watch out!! (Score:5, Funny)

      by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Sunday June 13, 2004 @08:21PM (#9416548)
      Contrary to nearly every science fiction chase scene, the asteroid belt in orbit around our star is hardly what anyone would call dense. It "survived"? Heck, it'd have to try pretty hard to hit a rock out there!
      Man, that makes me think how "Space C.O.P.S" is going to be such an awesome show in 50 years. Some hick gets drunk and wrecks his cruiser after he runs into an asteroid:
      I....I shweaa ofisher, dat f*cking asteroid comes from nowheers and plaws int....into ma spashe truck.
      Have you been drinking rocket fuel today son?
      Jusht a few spache beers, nutin' I cant....
      *Space pukes
      Ok, this is the most pointless post ever, I'm going to watch the Jetsons.
    • yes but this wasn't proven until we sent a probe through it. Hell, there's no way to have been able to tell if the belt wasn't littered with a pebble every 10 meters instead of every few million miles or so. (and a probe traveling ten thousand MPH hitting a stationary pebble is the same as a 10,000 MOH pebble hitting the probe).

  • Pioneer Anomaly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by coast99 ( 782648 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @07:53PM (#9416413) Homepage
    Of course, the most important contribution of Pioneer 10 to fundamental physics may be the Pioneer Anomaly : http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9808081

  • Pioneer's unexpected deceleration? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Johnno74 ( 252399 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @08:22PM (#9416550)
    I guess there are a few professional rocket scientists hanging out here (and plenty of amateurs...), so now is a good time to ask a question that has bugged me for a long time:

    Has any consensus been reached over what has caused the unexpected change in velocity of the Pioneer 10 and 11, Ulysses and Galileo probes? Remember this? [cnn.com]

    Since this was announced I've done some regular googling to see if this has ever been adequately explained. There are plenty of pages out there with plenty of theories, but most of the sites discussing this also have theories about things like zero-point energy generators, perpetual motion machines, that sort of stuff... Hardly the sort of thing that smells of proper scientific method.

    Other theories include drag from dust [newtonphysics.on.ca], Changing velocity of light [setterfield.org] and "tired light redshift" [estfound.org] (what the HELL is THAT???)

    I have found this [arxiv.org] paper, which looks very interesting, and much more authoritive, but its is unfortunately waaay over my head!

    There is still a lot of discussion [google.com] on this topic, can any astrophysics lurking here comment? Are we looking at a modification of gravity? Does this tie in with dark matter/energy?

    Ta :)

    • Re:Pioneer's unexpected deceleration? (Score:5, Informative)

      by coast99 ( 782648 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @08:58PM (#9416700) Homepage
      There was recently a conference about the
      Pioneer Anomaly and the conference webpage
      has links to various attempts of explanation.
      [http://www.zarm.uni-bremen.de/Pione er/]

      As far as I know, there is no consensus if the
      anomaly has a trivial explanation
      (gas leaking from satellite, dust in the
      solar system etc.) or if something non-trivial is happening, such as a quantum garvity effect,
      dark matter etc.
    • That looks so much like the messages I used to regularly find on Usenet during the "dawn" on Internet I was moved and almost cried in admiration ;-). The red shift of Pioneer and external references to Star Trek, god bless !

      Oh well, at least I can still find some here and there :)

    • Re:Pioneer's unexpected deceleration? (Score:5, Funny)

      by achurch ( 201270 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @10:32PM (#9417145) Homepage

      Of course, the physicists will never guess that it's really the gravitational effects of huge surveying ships taking measurements for a hyperspatial express route . . .

    • Could it be due to Relativistic Frame Dragging caused by the rotation of the Sun?

  • Where's the slit? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13, 2004 @08:25PM (#9416567)
    I don't mean to sound dirty in such a respectable forum, but I couldn't help but notice that the Pioneer plaque has much more attention given to the male genitalia than the female genitalia?

    Probably would've been a bush considering the period. Maybe none of the NASA plaque designers were good at curly hair.
    • Probably because it was made by uber-nerds who might still not have seen a woman naked now let alone back then! ;-) I'm just having a joke is all! No disrepect intended as I'm artistically challenged.

    • Re:Where's the slit? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Yunzil ( 181064 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @11:19PM (#9417331) Homepage
      From "The Cosmic Connection" by Carl Sagan:

      "The principle feminine criticism is that the woman is drawn incomplete -- that is, without any hint of external genitalia. The decision to omit a very short line in this diagram was made partly because conventional representation in Greek statuary omits it. But there was another reason: Our desire to see the message successfully launches on Pioneer 10. In retrospect, we may have judged NASA's scientific-political hierarchy as more puritanical than it is."

      He then goes on to cite cases of newspapers who, uh, removed the man's naughty bits when they published the picture.

      So, in short, the reason the "slit", as you so poetically called it, is missing is that we Americans are hung up about sex.

      Now you know.

  • 12 light-hours away.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alwin Henseler ( 640539 ) on Sunday June 13, 2004 @08:34PM (#9416609)
    And in 50 years from now, some space-tourists will play catch-up with it, just because they're curious what became of it

  • Using "space network"? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Libor Vanek ( 248963 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [kenav.robil]> on Sunday June 13, 2004 @09:19PM (#9416775) Homepage
    Hi - why can't NASA try to use some nearer spacecratt (Cassini, Mars Express etc.) to communicate with Pioneer 10?

    • Re:Using "space network"? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13, 2004 @09:31PM (#9416808)
      > Hi - why can't NASA try to use some nearer spacecratt
      > (Cassini, Mars Express etc.) to communicate with Pioneer 10?

      Because they really aren't that much closer, nor do they have sifficiently good antennas or receivers for the frequencies used for Pioneer 10 downlink.

      I would have to do some research, but I think the previous post referring to inadequate D/L signal strength as the cause of loss of communications is incorrect. I believe the prevailing theory is that the Radioisotope Thermal Generator (RTG ) used as a power supply can no longer provide enough power to trun on the transmitter. Once they miss a few passes, the pointing drifts off, then you are shafted.
    • If you go to the Pioneer site, it talks about uplinking commands to Pioneer via 200Kw transmitter....I think most space probes don't have that kind of reserve. Of course in addition there are issues with the antenna gain of them, as well as communicating with the same standard, etc. Its really just a lot easier to put low powered transmitters and smaller antenna on the bird, and just make up for it with on the earth side.

  • Only Metric Measures Please! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Even after the many mishaps (>$40 mil lost) due to the use of nonmetric measures, NASA still includes the nonmetric measures (miles and mph) in their descriptions. That is stupid.

    http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects /p ioneer/PNStat.html

  • My first 1-900 Number (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Johnny Fusion ( 658094 ) <zenmondo@gmailYEATS.com minus poet> on Sunday June 13, 2004 @11:27PM (#9417363) Homepage Journal
    I remember this date, because NASA set up a 900 number celebrating the event where you would call and listen to a little talk about how far Pioneer 10 had travled and then you could hear the "beep beep noises" coming from beyond the orbit of Neptune.

    My grandmother dialed the number for me (on a rotary dial phone!) and got mad since I listened to it twice, fearing it would charge her twice as much.

    This comment is so far down, I'd be surprised if noticed by anyone.
  • The woman of the Pioneer 10 plaque (check the Wikipedia link) has no genitals.

    Alien biologists will have a hard time figuring out how human reproduction works.

    Then when the aliens eventually realize that the genitals were omited for the woman (but not for the man) alien sociogists and psychologists will have even harder time explaining why we did this.

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