Pioneer 10, Farewell

The doughty little space probe has finally gone silent.

Comments

[Warren]

No one seems to care enough to post on this thread. Well I will. While I am not competent to make a fitting eulogy, but for what it's worth. I was just a wee lad when Pioneer went up. She captured my imagination as did everything space related at that time. Over the years I have changed much but whenever Pioneer was made mention of, I still took note and my imagination is still stirred.
Farewell old friend - I'll raise a glass for you tonight.

[harry tuttle]

Warren,

It's my understanding that a eulogy is not in order. It didn't blow up or anything. It's just too far away for us to communicate with it anymore.

[Jackson]

The article ends:

"The spacecraft continues to coast toward the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus. It will take 2 million years to reach it."

Suddenly I feel very mortal.

[Brian Doherty]

Harry Tuttle is of course correct, and he reminds me that--while the sense of loss I felt was akin to a death--the original title of this post--"Pioneer 10 R.I.P."--was misleading. I have thus, Superman-like, turned the earth backward on its axis to change the past, the retitled the entry more appropriately

[Greg Fagan]

I saw this in this morning's NYT, just after finishing a New Yorker piece on shortcomings in US intelligence in which Donald Rumsfeld quoted someone's summation of intel to this effect: There's stuff we know, stuff we know we don't know, and stuff we don't know we don't know. Suddenly Pioneer 10's not returning our calls? Sure, it probably crashed. But into what? Or...whom?