In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Redondo Beach, California—January 1972. Van Allen could almost catch his reflection in Iowa’s glittering gold box fitted with particle counters for Pioneer 10’s journey to the outer planets. The instruments on the mission promised the world a front-row seat for new discoveries at Jupiter. Astronomers gave good odds for radiation belts at Jupiter based on the hot glow around the planet that their radio telescopes measuredfromafar.Butnooneknewforsure.Thegold-cased detector that drew less power than a Christmas-tree light could help unravel such mysteries. TRW Systems built the spacecraft and Van Allen traveled there while in California in early January. Though he couldn’t be sure of the exact date, that’s when he believed he made a final check of his “flight unit” as Pioneer 10 stood anchored in a laboratory bay. The spacecraft itself amounted to a lightweight dish antenna that measured 10 feet across with an aluminumbody ,sixrocketthrusters,andathermonuclearpower generator. Designers kept the design sleek, compact, and simple —theirbestbetforatrailblazerwithacosmicitineraryand a cargo of ten instruments on the outside surface of the antenna dish. A magnetic field monitor was attached to a long boomtotakereadingswithoutinterferencefromthecraft.The mission and selection of this ark of instruments was fittingly managed by ARC, NASA’s shorthand for the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Van Allen admired the sheer beauty of these devices as they developed with their finely crafted casings. But, for all their style, the instruments stood up to shake tests, heat tests, cold tests, and radiation tests as NASA put them through their paces. Van Allen wore white cotton gloves to touch the polished gold,hygienicdetectorfittedwithsevenminiatureGeigercounters .JoeLepetich,experimentssystemsmanagerforAmes,was Pioneers to the Outer Planets 16 in and out of TRW and insisted that the scientists wear the gloves. The only evidence of human presence that Ames expected on this mission was the plaque designed by Carl Sagan, then the director of planetary studies at Cornell University. Should Pioneer 10 ever find its way to a distant star system, Sagan’s famous gold plaque carried a message of goodwill along with a galactic map and anatomical drawings of two people who appear sketched for a mural of the Garden of Eden. Lepetich wore white gloves, too, as Van Allen checked over the detector that he would never see again. Then Lepetich left the room for a minute and Van Allen, the least impulsive of men, couldn’t resist. “I took off my glove and, with my forefinger, I left a print on the bottom of the gold plate. And then I put my glove back on before Joe came back,” he later admitted to his team of graduate students. Pioneer 10, traveling at approximately 250 million miles a year, carries Van Allen’s personal talisman as it continues on its journey, more than 8 billion miles from Earth and heading toward the red star Aldebaran, the eye of the Taurus constellation some 2 million years of travel away. • • • NASA lost contact with Pioneer 10 in August 2000. Astronomers at the SETI Institute (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) tried again with the 300meter dish at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. “They make an attempt tocontactiteverysixmonthstocalibratetheirdish.Pioneeristheweakest,most reliable transmitter out there so it’s been an excellent source of calibration” for a place trying to catch a weak radio signal from some distant voice of intelligent life,VanAllensaid.ButevenwithArecibo’spowerfulear—morethanthreetimes larger than the antenna dishes in NASA’s Deep Space Network—Pioneer 10 remained lost in space. “There is very important data at this point because of the sun’s activity. It just grieves me all over to lose it at this point after it traveled so far—beyond all expectations,” Van Allen said in January 2001. His was the only instrument still operating on the craft, but that was enough for supporters to pull out all the stops. Project manager Larry Lasher tapped into a redundant communicationssystemthatfinallyreestablishedcontactlaterin2001.LikeHall, his bet for justifying Pioneer remained science—Van Allen’s science. “Ifwedidn’thavedatafromVanAllen’sinstrument,wecouldn’thavemaintained Pioneer 10. His prestige and his constant advocacy is what kept us going,” Lasher said. “Headquarters would say, ‘Why should we keep this going?’ And we said, ‘Well, Van Allen has this instrument and he wants the data, okay?’ So we were able to convince them, you know. Without Van Allen we couldn’t have done it.” 230 Pioneers to the Outer Planets Energized by the success of 2001, Van Allen appealed to NASA to formally reinstate the Pioneer 10 mission...

Share