Pioneer 10 on June 13, 1983 went beyond the solar system

Pioneer 10 on June 13

Pioneer 10 is the first space probe to have left the solar system, back in the 1980s. It was, in fact, June 13, 1983 when the aircraft left the orbit of Neptune, as we know the farthest planet in the system in which we live, its journey, however, had begun a few years earlier, on March 2, 1972. From immediately the probe began to send messages to the Earth and thus began what was one of the very first phases of space exploration which, to date, has assumed very different dimensions.

Thanks to Pioneer 10 we know many more things about space outside our solar system, even if the probe was not the only one to have set the record, followed by Pioneer 11, launched on April 5, 1973. Let's find out together the history of the space probe that first arrived where no one had ever dared to go before.

The story of Pioneer 10

To say that the launch of Pioneer 10 was pioneering, as well as a play on words, is an absolute truth, because it did not only bring in technological knowledge and engineering until then tested, but gave way to procedures that have now become standard. For example, the use of Atlas-Centaur, which in 1972 achieved one of the first great successes (after ten years of tests, failures and investigations to improve it). Altlas-Centaur is the upper stage for launch vehicles that has been the protagonist, in its sixty-year career, of the most important NASA missions. The Pioneer 10 experiment marked the first use of the Atlas-Centaur as a three-stage launch vehicle. The third stage was necessary to fly the probe at the speed of 51,810 km / h necessary for the flight to Jupiter. This made Pioneer 10 the fastest man-made object to leave Earth, fast enough to pass the Moon in eleven hours and to cross the orbit of Mars, some eighty million kilometers away, in just twelve weeks. >
Already on July 15, 1975, Pioneer 10 made a dangerous encounter with a series of asteroids traveling at twenty kilometers per second. After surprisingly passing this band of rocks of varying size, the probe began its journey towards Jupiter. It is thanks to her that we have, in fact, the first images of the planet that until then very little was known, contrary to today whose studies have reached excellent results. While passing close to Jupiter, Pioneer 10 obtained its first close-up images of the planet, detecting belts of intense radiation, locating the planet's magnetic field and discovering that Jupiter is predominantly a liquid planet. Information that scholars did not have before.

After closely observing Jupiter and arriving near Neptune, then leaving our solar system in 1983, Pioneer 10 wanders into deep, unknown space. One of the last messages sent by the probe to Mother Earth dates back to several years ago. To remember, among the most recent messages, that of 2001 which gave scientists hope, beating the record of the successor Pioneer 11 which stopped communicating as early as 1996. Today, Pioneer 10 no longer communicates with our planet but goes with self on board a message for anyone to find the probe once it undergoes the gravitational pull of other planets or whatever may be out there.

Pioneer 10 message

In all likelihood, for the general public the most important feature of the first robotic probe to leave the solar system is the famous golden plate, intended for any extraterrestrial civilizations that may come into contact with Pioneer 10. The probe plate gives basic information about our civilization, a kind of message in the bottle for explorers that we cannot yet know or be sure of their existence. The message was conceived by Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University and designed by his wife, Linda Salzman Sagan.

The plaque represents, to be sure, the first attempt at extraterrestrial communication, on it are depicted a man and a woman standing in front of the silhouette of a spaceship. The man's hand is raised in a gesture of goodwill and the physical constitution of man and woman was determined by the results of a computerized analysis of the average person. The key to translating the plaque lies in understanding the breakdown of the most common element in the universe, namely hydrogen. This element is illustrated in the left corner of the plate, in schematic form, which shows the hyperfine transition (i.e. the magnetic interaction between the electrons and the nuclear atom) of the neutral atomic hydrogen. Anyone from a scientifically educated civilization who has sufficient knowledge of hydrogen would be able to translate the message.

In addition to the famous message, the Pioneer 10 was also equipped with very sophisticated equipment, very advanced for the epoch. On board the probe, in fact, you can find: a helium vector magnetometer, a plasma analyzer, a measuring instrument for charged particles, a cosmic ray telescope, a Geiger tube telescope, a detector of trapped radiation, a detector of meteoroids, an ultraviolet photometer, an imaging photopolarimeter, an infrared radiometer.

The Pioneer and Voyager missions

In addition to Pioneer 10 and 11, other space probes have started over the years their journey into the cosmos, let's talk about the Voyager missions. Launched a few years later, in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 now lie beyond the heliopause and the interstellar boundary, and is now more than 152 astronomical units (AU) from us, where one AU is the mean distance between the Sun and the Earth. In other words, Voyager 1 has traveled over 14 billion miles to date, while its brother, Voyager 2, has traveled over 11.7 billion miles. However, it will take another ninety thousand years for Pioneer 10 to meet again a sun and a possible star system. We are talking about HIP 117795, an orange-red star in the constellation of Cassiopeia, staying at a distance of 0.231 parsecs (0.753 light years).

Both Pioneer and Voyager probes will continue their journey in the cosmos even when the Earth will no longer exist, and the information they are custodians of will probably be able to preserve the memory of our civilization even millions of light years away from us. Space exploration is still in its infancy, but more and more technological probes are appearing in the solar system, ready to explore what surrounds us and that we still cannot understand. If you want to learn more about space exploration through the use of robots, you can buy the book Robot in Cosmic Infinity at this link.