NASA Lost Contact With Pioneer 10 After 30-Year Mission as Final Signal Crossed 12 Billion Kilometers
Updated
Updated · spacedaily.com · Jun 10
NASA Lost Contact With Pioneer 10 After 30-Year Mission as Final Signal Crossed 12 Billion Kilometers
1 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · Jun 10
Summary
A final weak carrier from Pioneer 10 reached NASA on Jan. 23, 2003 after an 11-hour trip across roughly 12 billion kilometers; follow-up calls two weeks later got only background noise.
30 years and 10 months after launch, the probe had run out of usable electrical power as its plutonium-fueled RTG system and thermocouples decayed below the level needed to transmit a detectable signal.
Pioneer 10 was built for a 21-month mission but survived Jupiter’s intense radiation, crossed Neptune’s orbit in 1983, and became the first human-made object to pass beyond all then-known planets.
Tracking data from Pioneer 10 and 11 also produced the long-running “Pioneer anomaly,” resolved in 2012 as uneven heat radiation from the spacecraft rather than new physics.
Now more than 20 billion kilometers from Earth, the silent probe is still drifting outward toward Aldebaran on a journey expected to take more than 2 million years.