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- Pioneer 10 was launched on 2 March 1972 on top of an Atlas/Centaur/TE364-4 launch vehicle. The launch marked the first use of the Atlas-Centaur as a three-stage launch vehicle. The third stage was required to rocket Pioneer 10 to the speed of 51,810 kilometers per hour (32,400 mph) needed for the flight to Jupiter. This made Pioneer the fastest manmade object to leave the Earth, fast enough to pass the Moon in 11 hours and to cross the Mars orbit, about 80 million kilometers (50 million miles) away, in just 12 weeks. On 15 July 1972 Pioneer 10 entered the Asteroid Belt, a doughnut shaped area which measures some 280 million kilometers wide and 80 million kilometers thick. The material in the belts travels at speed about 20 km/sec. and ranges in size from dust particles to rock chunks as big as Alaska. After safely traversing the Asteroid Belt, Pioneer 10 headed toward Jupiter. Accelerated by the massive giant to a speed of 132,000 km/hr (82,000 mph), Pioneer 10 passed by Jupiter within 130,354 km (81,000 miles) of the cloudtops on December 3, 1973. During the passage by Jupiter, Pioneer 10 obtained the first close-up images of the planet, charted Jupiter's intense radiation belts, located the planet's magnetic field, and discovered that Jupiter is predominantly a liquid planet. Following its encounter with Jupiter, Pioneer 10 explored the outer regions of the Solar system, studying energetic particles from the Sun (Solar Wind), and cosmic rays entering our portion of the Milky Way. The spacecraft continued to make valuable scientific investigations in the outer regions of the solar system until its science mission ended on March 31, 1997. Since that time, Pioneer 10's weak signal has been tracked by the DSN as part of an advanced concept study of communication technology in support of NASA's future interstellar probe mission. The spacecraft had also been used to help train flight controllers how to acquire radio signals from space during the Lunar Prospector mission. The power source on Pioneer 10 finally degraded to the point where the signal to Earth dropped below the threshold for detection in its latest contact attempt on 7 February, 2003. The previous three contacts had very faint signals with no telemetry received. The last time a Pioneer 10 contact returned telemetry data was on 27 April 2002. Group: Platform_Details Entry_ID: PIONEER 10 Group: Platform_Identification Platform_Category: Interplanetary Spacecraft Platform_Series_or_Entity: FLYBY Short_Name: PIONEER 10 End_Group Group: Synonymous_Platform_Names Short_Name: Pioneer-F Short_Name: 05860 Short_Name: 1972-012A End_Group Creation_Date: 2007-02-05 Online_Resource: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1972-012A Sample_Image: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/spacecraft/pioneer10-11.jpg Group: Platform_Logistics Launch_Date: 1972-03-02 Launch_Site: Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center, USA Primary_Sponsor: NASA/Ames Primary_Sponsor: TRW End_Group End_Group
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| Abstract from DBPedia | Pioneer 10 (originally designated Pioneer F) is an American space probe, launched in 1972 and weighing 260 kilograms (570 pounds), that completed the first mission to the planet Jupiter. Thereafter, Pioneer 10 became the first of five artificial objects to achieve the escape velocity needed to leave the Solar System. This space exploration project was conducted by the NASA Ames Research Center in California. The space probe was manufactured by TRW Inc. Pioneer 10 was assembled around a hexagonal bus with a 2.74-meter (9 ft 0 in) diameter parabolic dish high-gain antenna, and the spacecraft was spin stabilized around the axis of the antenna. Its electric power was supplied by four radioisotope thermoelectric generators that provided a combined 155 watts at launch. It was launched on March 3, 1972, at 01:49:00 UTC (March 2 local time), by an Atlas-Centaur expendable vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Between July 15, 1972, and February 15, 1973, it became the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt. Photography of Jupiter began November 6, 1973, at a range of 25,000,000 kilometers (16,000,000 mi), and about 500 images were transmitted. The closest approach to the planet was on December 3, 1973, at a range of 132,252 kilometers (82,178 mi). During the mission, the on-board instruments were used to study the asteroid belt, the environment around Jupiter, the solar wind, cosmic rays, and eventually the far reaches of the Solar System and heliosphere. Radio communications were lost with Pioneer 10 on January 23, 2003, because of the loss of electric power for its radio transmitter, with the probe at a distance of 12 billion kilometers (80 AU) from Earth.パイオニア10号（英語: Pioneer 10）は、アメリカ航空宇宙局の惑星探査機。世界初の木星探査機である。 (Source: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Pioneer_10) |
