NASASpaceFlight.com Forum
Robotic Spacecraft (Astronomy, Planetary, Earth, Solar/Heliophysics) => Space Science Coverage => Topic started by: Chris Bergin on 07/15/2017 11:51 am
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Great feature on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft's anniversary and how that ties in with Juno's big event - by Chris Gebhardt:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/07/pioneer-10-first-probe-inner-precursor-juno/
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Thanks Chris G for a enjoyable and informative read.
One minor nit: "... was overtaken by Voyager 1 – which was moving away from the sun 1 AU faster than Pioneer 10" ... should be a rate. 1 AU per Year?
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Also, the favorable launch trajectory should be every 13 months, not 13 years.
Or, the 13 years was for the combination of Pioneer 10 and 11.
Pioneer 11 went to Saturn, which is in conjunction with Jupiter every 20 years. I'm not sure how long the window for Pioneer would have been to use Jupiter for a Saturn course change, but maybe it would have been another 13 years if it had missed that one.
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Also, the favorable launch trajectory should be every 13 months, not 13 years.
Yes, that confused me. I started thinking about possible gravity assists, but the article later said that none were involved (on route to Jupiter). Still, interesting read on Pioneer 10, thanks for a good article.
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Yay! Thanks for the Pioneer shout-out. I worked on Pioneer 10/11 (IPP image rectification and trajectory planning) for Jupiter encounter, and subsequent Pionoeer 11 Jupiter and Saturn encounters.
Couple items that may not be intuitively obvious to the casual observer from the vantage of this day and age. The Pioneer's were truly pioneers and pathfinders for subsequent missions; Voyager in particular--and Pioneer mission parameters were adjusted based on the needs of Voyager.
E.g., why didn't Pioneer 11 shoot Cassini's gap--as the Pioneer team wanted (at least some of us)? Because Voyager was not going to follow that trajectory, and therefor would not benefit Voyager. In short, you need to view the decisions made for Pioneer in light of Voyager's objectives and requirements...
No one really knew whether the asteroid belt posed a threat to spacecraft survival. Pioneer 10 showed it was not an issue.
No one really knew whether Jupiter's radiation belts posed a threat to spacecraft survival. Pioneer 10 showed it *was* an issue. What we found surprised everyone. A crash rad-hard redesign of Voyager ensued (otherwise Voyager would have been DOA at Jupiter).
No one had done spin-scan imaging at the relative/angular velocities required at Jupiter (spin-scan == cheap). Spinning planet... high velocity fly-by... amazing we got anything useful or reconizable back (especially at the constained very low data rates).[1]
No one had done real synthetic three-color imaging (RGB) using two channels (RB). Two (RB) channels instead of three == cheap.[1] Pioneers were all about cheap.
Any number of items I'm likely forgetting, but those were the high points IIRC.
After a series of health checks, mission controllers uplinked 16,000 encounter commands to Pioneer 10 covering the entire 60-day encounter sequence.
Not really. We had thousands of command sequences prepared for nominal encounter (and more contingency), but the spacecraft only had room for a few stored commands (5-6 IIRC?) at any moment (we referred to it as a "command sequencer", not a "computer"). So we had to feed commands in real time to the spacecraft via the DSN.
Given ~90 minute round-trip-light-time, the command sequences were prepared and transmitted based on a nominal trajectory/behavior model. No option for "closed loop", and we could not afford anything approaching autonomous decision-making by the spacecraft given the technology-mass-power budget available at that time.
[1] Required liberal application of subject matter experts--specifically astronomers with ground-based experience who knew what the images "should look like"--and who manually tweaked the images accordingly. That included manually tweaking colors, and geometry.
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Great article, thanks.
I was a little confused about the changes to the flyby date to avoid DSN issues. Was this achieved by launching in a different window, or en-route by altering the MCC burn?
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Yay! Thanks for the Pioneer shout-out. I worked on Pioneer 10/11 (IPP image rectification and trajectory planning) for Jupiter encounter, and subsequent Pionoeer 11 Jupiter and Saturn encounters.
I hope you've seen the work by Ted Stryk to reprocess the IPP data using modern techniques. Here's a sample:
http://planetimages.blogspot.com/2011/08/close-shot-from-pioneer-10.html
IIRC, much of his work on the Pioneer images is done using scans of hardcopies of the digital data as matrices. Mr. Stryk was a frequent poster on UnmannedSpaceFlight.com, you can find more of his work there.
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I hope you've seen the work by Ted Stryk to reprocess the IPP data using modern techniques. Here's a sample:
Thanks! Had not see Ted's work. Pity he has to scan images from crappy sources. NASA has (or should have) the original high resolution source images, if not the data. They were kept under lock-and-key at the time... no idea what has happened since. They were produced by an HP system which used a tape source with an optical drum plotter to produce the images.
We took the source tapes from JPL (courier arrived PM daily); we processed them early PM to early AM (on a CDC 6400 system at University of Arizona; generated tapes for consumption by the imaging system (HP optical plotter, University of Arizona Optical Sciences Center); subsequently produced R-G-B images (one each); then put them together to produce the color images; subsequently made pretty pictures, which JPL released to the press et. al.
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Could be like the Lunar Orbiter data, the tapes exist but the tech to read them isn't readily available. Keith Cowing did yeoman's work recovering data from the old tapes using a tape drive that was basically found by accident, IIRC. Stryk has made appeals for a couple of the Pioneer image data sets that he cannot find. With the Planetary Data System now, hopefully we won't lose any of the more modern data.
Edit: old Pioneer 10/11 tapes, possibly unreadable due to mold damage, found in former engineer's basement with tape drives. NASA archivist recommended the tapes be destroyed (probably reasonable conclusion, but still...sigh).
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/nasa-computer-engineer-basement/
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When I was in 6th-7th grade at the time of the Voyager 2 flyby the Pioneers 10 and 11 were my favorite missions because they went first, they were the farthest missions from earth and nobody was talking about them. Back in 1990 it was near impossible to find anything in the public libraries about them, either in books or in newspaper articles. Voyager on the other hand had full diagrams and all instruments labeled. Reading the article it is hard to not be amazed by just how old the mission is: proposed in 1964! 1964 is before the first flyby of Mars
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....Bump for Engineering videos of launch
Pioneer 10 Launch - High Frame Rate Cameras, Real Speed, Atlas-Centaur Rocket, Space Probe, NASA
https://youtu.be/tY7-cSU7S0U
Apr 13, 2023
High FPS camera views of Pioneer 10 launch on March 2, 1972. Sequences are shown at real speed and presented at 60fps. Side-by-side views are shown first, with individual camera sequences at the end of the video.
Original high frame rate camera sequences were remastered from SDASM:
• HACL Film 00741 A...
Some photos of the launch are shown along with film footage. The original launch footage was silent - sound from an Atlas-Centaur launch was added.
Sound and image cleanup, conversion to original 24 fps frame rate, geometry and color correction by RetroSpace HD.
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Pioneer 10 (originally designated Pioneer F) is a NASA space probe, launched in 1972 that completed the first mission to the planet Jupiter.
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 onboard 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.
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