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.