Pioneer 10

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Image:Pioneer 10 Construction.jpg Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, and was the first spacecraft to make direct observations of Jupiter. It was launched on March 2, 1972. By some definitions, Pioneer 10 has become the first artificial object to leave the solar system. However, Pioneer 10 still has not passed the heliopause or Oort cloud.

1 Mission
2 Pioneer anomaly
3 Fictional references
4 See also
5 External links

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Mission

Image:AC72-2143.2.jpg On December 3, 1973, Pioneer 10 sent back the first close-up images of Jupiter. On June 13th 1983 it passed the orbit of Neptune, then the outermost planet because of Pluto's highly eccentric orbit.

Famed for a time as the most remote object ever made by man, at last contact Pioneer 10 was over 7.60 billion miles away from Earth. (Until February 17, 1998, the heliocentric radial distance of Pioneer 10 had been greater than that of any other man-made object. But later on that date, Voyager 1's heliocentric radial distance, in the approximate apex direction, equaled that of Pioneer 10 at 69.419 AU. Afterward, Voyager 1's distance exceeds that of Pioneer 10 at the approximate rate of 1.016 AU per year). As of December 30, 2005 Pioneer 10 was 89.7 AU away from the Sun.

Image:PPlaqueLarge.png Pioneer 10 was also outfitted with a plaque to serve as a message for any extraterrestrial life, in the event that it may be discovered.

Built by TRW [1], the spacecraft made valuable scientific investigations in the outer regions of our solar system until the end of its mission on March 31, 1997. The Pioneer 10's weak signal continued to be tracked by the Deep Space Network as part of a new advanced concept study of chaos theory. Before 1997 the probe was used in the training of flight controllers on how to acquire radio signals from space.

Image:Pioneer 10 jup.jpg The last, very weak, signal from Pioneer 10 was received January 23, 2003. A contact attempt February 7, 2003 was not successful. The last successful reception of telemetry was on April 27, 2002; subsequent signals were barely strong enough to detect. Loss of contact was probably due to a combination of increasing distance and the spacecraft's steadily weakening power source, rather than failure of the craft. One final attempt was made in March 2006, the last time the antenna would be correctly aligned with Earth. So far, no response has been received from Pioneer 10 but researchers are still going over data. [2]

Pioneer 10 is heading in the direction of the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus. It will take Pioneer over 2 million years to reach it.

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Pioneer anomaly

Image:Pioneer10 art.jpg Main article: Pioneer anomaly

Analysis of the radio tracking data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft at distances between 20–70 AU from the Sun has consistently indicated the presence of an anomalous, small Doppler frequency drift. The drift can be interpreted as being due to a constant acceleration of (8.74 ± 1.33) × 10⁻¹⁰ m/s² directed towards the Sun. Although it is suspected that there is a systematic origin to the effect, none has been found. As a result, the nature of this anomaly has become of growing interest.

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