The objective of the Pioneer 10 space probe was to explore the extremes of the solar system and bring a message of greeting to extraterrestrial civilizations. In essence, he had to collect data for the Voyager program.
What carries the Pioneer 10?
This probe carries a plaque with the figures of a human man and woman and various symbols that are designed to provide information about the position of the Earth. The plaque, made of gold anodized aluminum to prevent degradation, is a symbol of hope and the scientists attached this message in case the spacecraft was ever found by intelligent life forms from another planetary system; a kind of interstellar “message in a bottle”. The plaque was designed and popularized by the American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan and by fellow American astronomer Frank Drake.
Your trip
The Pioneer 10 journey began with the launch on an Atlas-Centaur SLV-3C with a Star 37E third stage, the first time it had flown this configuration. Upon deployment of the third stage, the spacecraft was traveling at 14.4 kilometers per second; at the time, it had become the fastest man-made object to leave the Earth-Moon system.
A wide range of milestones
It was the first spacecraft to pass through the asteroid belt , at a time when scientists weren’t really sure how dense the belt was and whether it would make it through successfully, since smaller asteroids couldn’t be detected from Earth. , so the risk of the ship being badly damaged by the small pebbles was very real. Fortunately, there was no catastrophic event and the probe became, shortly after, on December 3, 1973, the first to make a close observation of the planet Jupiter (which is 588 million kilometers from us). It provided us with the first direct observations of the planet and obtained never-before-seen close-up images of Jupiter.
It was a historic moment for science as it marked the first approach of humans to Jupiter, opening the way for exploration of the outer solar system. It was also the first spacecraft to use all-nuclear electrical power.
Thanks to this first passage of Pioneer 10, Voyager would follow touring the outer planets, Ulysses leaving the ecliptic (the curved line where the Sun travels on the celestial sphere in its apparent transit observed from our planet), Galileo investigating to Jupiter and its satellites or the Cassini probe traveling to Saturn and probing Titan.
In that epic moment of seeing Jupiter for the first time, Pioneer 10 , in addition to taking images of the planet and its moons, also took measurements of Jupiter’s magnetosphere, radiation belts, magnetic field, atmosphere and interior. All of them, extremely important data for the subsequent design of the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft.
The end of its mission would come on March 31, 1997, although its signal continued to be tracked by the Deep Space Network (DSN) as part of a NASA advanced communication technology concept study.
When did you send your last signal?
On January 23, 2003, when it was 12,000 million kilometers from Earth , the Pioneer 10 space probe made its last contact on Earth after more than 30 years providing rich and dense astronomical information to get lost in the confines of the cosmos. According to the US space agency, its power supply was degraded to such an extent that the signal was already imperceptible from Earth. Likewise, the Deep Space Network or Deep Space Network did not receive telemetry days later during the month of February.
Be that as it may, Pioneer 10 is heading, alone and silent, towards the red star Aldebaran, located in the constellation of Taurus, about 68 light years away from Earth.
File:
Release Date: March 2, 1972
Top speed: 132,000km/h
Orbit speed: 12.04 km/s
Weight: 258.8 kg
Scientific instruments: 11 (meteorite detectors, a camera, a radiometer, a photometer, a cosmic ray detector, a plasma analyzer and a magnetometer, among others).
Referencia: Siddiqi, Asif A. Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958-2016. NASA History Program Office, 2018.
