As reported by Larry Kellogg, the recent attempt to pick up a signal from Pioneer 10 may have come up short, although the team working on the project is processing the data in the attempt to pin down anything that isn't noise. Says Kellogg: Distance makes a difference... The 8 watt transmitter wouldn't be putting out a full 8 watts (a night light of power) and the signals seen at Earth were buried down in the noise you get from just pointing an antenna out into space. It is like looking for a needle in the front lawn down in the grass. One spike looks a lot like the one next to it. If you see something you think is your needle you can narrow the band pass filter and magnify what you are looking at. You don't see anything next to it though and so you have to look back and fourth and hope you recognize your needle. We haven't had any signals from Pioneer since 23 January 2003; the last telemetry data were received on 27 April 2002. With no real-time detection of the spacecraft's...

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...

This is shaping up to be a busy day, starting with good news from the Stardust mission. Having opened the sample return capsule at Johnson Space Center in Houston, the science team found that the sample tray held numerous particles captured not only from comet Wild 2 but interstellar particles collected during the missions' seven year journey. Stardust principal investigator Donald Brownlee said it all: "The collection of cometary particles has exceeded our expectations. We were absolutely thrilled to see thousands of impacts on the aerogel." Coming up at 1100 EST (1600 GMT) is a news conference held by Stardust team members in Houston, with coverage on NASA TV (and I notice that NASA will offer video of the opening of the Stardust cannister at 1500 EST today). Also imminent is another attempt to launch New Horizons, now scheduled for 1308 EST (1808 GMT), and available both through NASA TV and useful pages like the ELV Countdown Portal at Kennedy Space Center. The New Horizons launch...