Good evening, Kibitzers! As I write on Monday night, I’m still getting snowed on. The power went out a few times, but it’s back now and I hope it’ll stay. On the off chance that I don’t show up when this posts, though, that’s what you should suspect first.
Meanwhile, in non-surface-of-earth news, today marks the anniversary of the day in 1973 when the Pioneer 10 spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter, only 81,000 miles from the cloud tops. The plucky probe, launched in March 1972, was the first human-made object to pass Mars, to pass through the asteroid belt, to make close observations and direct images of Jupiter, and then to pass beyond the orbits of the major planets.
Indeed, it may still be going. We last received a signal from it in early 2003, over 30 years along, after which, it’s thought, its power source had degraded so as to make its signal too weak to detect. It was over 8 billion miles away at that point. As far as we know, it’s still coasting along in the direction of Aldebaran, and will take about 2 million years to get there.
You may remember the golden phonograph record carried by the later Voyager probes. Its precursor was the golden plaque affixed to Pioneer 10 and 11, an item whipped up by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake in only a few months. They realized that the little ships could conceivably be drifting out in space long after we’re all gone, so they wanted to give a finder some indication of where the probes came from, and from whom. That ‘plaque’ link explains the images they chose.
Here’s a ten-ish minute account of the Pioneer 10 mission, by The History Guy.
And here’s a NASA JPL slide show reviewing the history of Jupiter exploration.
So, let’s see a few of Pioneer 10’s images:
You know this is all a big excuse to post some pictures from the Juno mission, right? Because they are spectacular. (I wrote about Juno for KTK in 2016, when it was just reaching Jupiter and about to go into orbit. The mission pages linked there are still up, and the Southwest Research Institute one in particular has some more really awesome pictures.)
These features always look to me like agate, or some similar semi-precious stone, or maybe a piece of Murano glass.
You need to see these two at full resolution!
Okay, this concludes the psychedelic portion of our program. See you in the comments, I hope!