Pioneer 10

Launched on March 2, 1972 by an Atlas-Centaur rocket, Pioneer 10 (also called Pioneer F) was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, and was the first spacecraft to make direct observations of Jupiter. 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. By some definitions, this made the spacecraft the first artificial object to leave the solar system. However, Pioneer 10 has still not passed the heliopause or Oort cloud.

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Famed for a time as the most remote object ever made by man, at last contact Pioneer 10 was over 7.6 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. Thereafter, Voyager 1's distance will exceed that of Pioneer 10 at the approximate rate of 1.016 AU per year).

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Built by TRWhttp://quest.nasa.gov/sso/cool/pioneer10/mission/, 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.

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The last, very weak, signal from Pioneer 10 was received January 23, 2003. A contact attempt February 7, 2003, was not successful and further attempts are not planned. 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.

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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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March 2: March 2 is the 61st day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (62nd in leap years). There are 304 days remaining....

1972: 1972 was a leap year that started on a Saturday....

Asteroid belt: The asteroid belt is a region of the solar system falling roughly between the planets Mars and Jupiter where the greatest concentration of asteroid orbits can be found....

Pioneer 10 related Images and Photos (experimental)

Pioneer Monument Denver Colorado	Neon Pioneer Club Las Vegas Nevada	Totem Pole in Pioneer Square Seattle Washington USA	Daniel Boone American Pioneer
Picture of the Pioneer for Communism	Buttercups and Wagon Wheel Pioneer Homestead Great Smoky Mountains National Park North Carolina	Last Letter from Attu The True Story of Etta Jones, Alaska Pioneer and Japanese Pow (Paperback) Book