True Pioneer Robot Headin’ to Taurus
 

       A calling card from Earth is silently heading to the bright, red star in our winter night sky, a true pioneer of mankind’s first steps into interplanetary exploration.

       Pioneer 10 was the first man-made object to pass through the asteroid belt, visit Jupiter and eventually leave the Solar System.

       Launched on March 3, 1972, the TRW-built spacecraft had its switch flipped off on March 31, 1997 when it was about 6 billion miles from Earth.  A few telemetry downloads were squeezed out of Pioneer 10 in 2002 when it was 7.5 billion miles from our Sun, simply a very bright star from that distance.

       Forty-three years after it was sent to the stars, Pioneer 10 is silent as it travels at 27,000 miles per hour in interstellar space.  It is headed toward Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull, the “V-shaped” constellation with the red star that is easy to see in our autumn to early spring night skies.

Today, Pioneer 10 is more than 10 billion miles from the Sun, whose light takes more than 15 hours to reach the spacecraft. Pioneer 10 will take 2 million years to reach Aldebaran, a bloated, red giant of a star, 68 Light Years away.

       But if along the way to Aldebaran aliens snag this strange contraption with the nine foot communications disk, they’ll learn a lot about earthlings.  Welded to the satellite frame is a special plaque that was a bit controversial in the early 1970s for graphically portraying a naked man and woman. 

       The brainchild of astronomer Carl Sagan, this 6x9 inch gold-ionized aluminum plaque was engraved with scientific notation and the image of a man, woman and the Pioneer 10 spacecraft behind them for scale. The outrage of the line drawing showing the man’s penis and woman’s breasts overshadowed the real reason—so aliens know what we look like, where we came from and what our world is made of. 

       The data was ingeniously etched with simple notation in scientific language. There is a chart of our Solar System and Pioneer 10’s left turn at Jupiter and out to interstellar space.

The plaque uses binary code of 0s and 1s for language, the universal hydrogen atom as a yardstick, and the position of 14 “pulsars” in the sky as a bulls-eye to our Sun. The pulsars are the radial lines with their coordinates in binary, the logic being any advanced aliens would know these sites of mega energy output. Pulsars are small neutron stars that emit high energy waves in beams, like a cosmic lighthouse.  

But it was the blatant display of human sex organs that got the ire of some public moral advocates.  Letters to the editors of newspapers who published the Pioneer plaque called it pornographic and obscene.  There was criticism by some religious groups for the lack of a reference to “God” among the clever scientific notation.

Pioneer was a series of NASA satellites that explored the Moon and Venus in the 1960s, each mission a new test for equipment and experiments.  When it was realized that the outer planets would be lined up for a “Grand Tour” by spacecraft in the 1970s, Pioneer 10 to Jupiter and Pioneer 11 to Jupiter and Saturn became the first to push the envelope.  Eventually, Voyager 1 would go to Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 would complete the “Grand Tour” to Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s.

       The Pioneer 10 was a true pioneer in many ways, including its design.  Because solar panels were no good so far away from the Sun, interplanetary spacecraft need a nuclear source of fuel. And because of radiation effecting scientific instruments, these “RTG” power sources are placed on long booms, away from the main core “bus” of a satellite.

       When launched by an Atlas-Centaur rocket, Pioneer 10 reached a then-high 31,000 mph.  The gravity of Jupiter and its moons changed the velocity of the spacecraft, but nothing in the void of space allows a resistance to the current speed of 26,000 mph. That’s 230 million miles a year.

        Pioneer 10’s sister craft, Pioneer 11, also has an identical etched plaque.  And on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts of the 1980s, an actual gold record, complete with a needle, were place aboard with images, music and important written words included to explain Earth, humans and our Solar System.

       Voyager 1 actually eclipsed the distance of Pioneer 10, though launched 5 years later in 1977. Voyager 1 is traveling at 10,000 mph faster and has hit 12 billion miles from the Sun—in the minus -200 F. degree void of interstellar space.

       These four stellar voyagers have all left the Solar System and are traveling to the stars. They will soon be joined by NASA’s New Horizon, headed to Pluto in July 2015, then beyond to other “dwarf planets” in the unexplored Kuiper Belt of small bodies circling the Solar System.  Aboard New Horizon are a few messages from its builders, as well as some ashes of 1930 Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.

 These five American spacecraft are headed to the stars, their design alone a testament to the intelligent creatures that sent them.   

       The message in a bottle that the famous Pioneer and Voyager contain may outlive the Earth itself. Image a civilization actually finding Pioneer 10 and realizing they are the ones who are not alone!