Pioneer 10
February 27th, 2003
Pioneer 10 has finally fallen silent some thirty years after it left Earth for the far corners of the solar system and beyond.
This sort of news makes me feel old: I well remember the excitement of seeing Pioneer 10’s images of Jupiter when I was in high school. The Voyager probes a few years later produced better images of more worlds, but Pioneer got there first and started to open our eyes to just how strange and varied a place the solar system really is.
Then there was the famous gold plaque, introducing the human race and providing the Aldebaranii with a road map so they can come by and say “Hi” some four million years hence. I do hope the neighbours are friendly…
March 1st, 2003 at 2:59 am
It is quite amazing. Even though Pioneer is only a machine, I feel quite sad at the reminder of how *big* space is as it goes off somewhere so mindblowingly far from home - yet so trivial in terms of interstellar distances.