The attempt to contact Pioneer 10, clearly for the last time, is on for March 3, 4 and 5. That according to Larry Kellogg on his To the Moon, Mars and Beyond weblog, which bears quoting this afternoon:
Earth has come around the Sun and will be directly within Pioneer 10’s antenna pattern, if an antenna pattern there might be. Might be, because the fixed frequency oscillator is dead and the only way to wake up the spacecraft is to send up a strong signal which will wake up the variable frequency oscillator and let the spacecraft send back a signal at a known offset from what it sees coming up.
This will be the last time Earth will be here as the Sun drags us along as it goes on its way around the Solar System. Each year Earth moves over just a bit in space and in the past you could command Pioneer 10 to re-align itself to look at a 400 KW up-link signal from Earth but there is not enough power on board Pioneer 10 to do that now and no one is sending commands anyway. [Mission long over and I took all the equipment out of the Pioneer Operations space, sorry.]
Centauri Dreams‘ take: Larry Kellogg’s involvement with the Pioneer program and his passion for space exploration makes his weblog a frequently checked destination here. And I think he’s right in thinking the best we can hope for from this last listening session is a data point that may come in handy in understanding the Pioneer Anomaly. Kellogg also points out that there have been hardware changes within the Deep Space Network that removed equipment that was once used to decode the down link — in other words, we may hear from Pioneer, but what we hear will be but a whisper.
Nonetheless, it’s a reassuring measure of our success in building hardened electronics that even this ‘old bird,’ as Kellogg refers to Pioneer 10, just might still be alive. What that tells me is that the much longer missions we’ll need to send into the Kuiper Belt and beyond are manageable from the payload standpoint. The kicker, as always, is propulsion, about which more soon as we take another look at Claudio Maccone’s FOCAL mission to the gravity focus. The options for getting there seem increasingly robust, at least from a theoretical point of view (budgets are an entirely different matter!).
