Jun 13 1988
From The Space Library
This date marked five years since the Pioneer 10 spacecraft had left the solar system on its trajectory toward interstellar space. Pioneer 10-the most distant human-made object in existence-was now 4,175,500,000 miles from the Sun, almost 45 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Radio signals, moving at the speed of light, took 12 hours and 26 minutes to travel from Earth to spacecraft and back, the longest time of any radio communication in history.
The spacecraft, launched in 1972, continued to operate extremely well as it collected and transmitted data back to Earth. Its primary mission, originally scheduled for 21 months, was to assess the feasibility of passage through the Asteroid Belt and provide the first close-up examination of Jupiter and its moons. Pioneer 10 accomplished all of its original goals by December 1973. At that point, the mission was indefinitely extended. Scientists reprogrammed the probe to explore the Sun's atmosphere and to look for a tenth planet and gravity waves in the far outer solar system and beyond.
Recent improvements in the NASA ground stations were expected to allow communications with Pioneer 10 to continue until the range approached six billion miles, more than twice the pre-launch estimates. Project Manager Richard O. Fimmel expected that NASA would be able to track Pioneer 10 until the power source limited communications, which was expected to occur toward the end of the 1990s.
Both Pioneer 10 and its sister spacecraft, Pioneer 11, carried an easily interpreted graphic message in the event that they encountered any intelligent life forms on their journey. Scientists believed Pioneer 10 and 11 would travel among the stars virtually forever because the vacuum of interstellar space is so empty that the risk of any type of collision would be negligible. (ARC Release 88-36)
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