The Pioneer 10 spacecraft celebrates 51 years of voyage to infinity

MADRID 2 (EUROPE PRESS)

On March 2, 1972, NASA launched Pioneer 10. first probe that crossed the asteroid belt and reached the planet Jupiterthe main objective of his mission.

The ship, which has been on its 51st anniversary, continued on its way to the edge of the Solar System until contact with it was lost in 2003 when it was 12,000 million kilometers from Earth. Currently, the ship is heading towards the star Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, where it will arrive in 1,690,000 years.

What makes this ship famous is that it contains a plate inscribed with a symbolic message that informs the extraterrestrial civilization that could intercept the probe about the human being and his place of origin, Earth, a kind of “message in a Bottle” interstellar. This plate was made of gold anodized aluminum, because this element has certain properties that cause it to degrade minimally, reports Wikipedia.

On the plate appears, on the right, the image of the probe with the sole purpose of giving proportion to the two human figures drawn in front, one female and the other male.

On the left are a bundle of lines that start radially from the same point; that point is the planet Earth; the lines indicate the direction of the most significant pulsars close to our solar system and in each one, in binary numbering system, the sequence of pulses of each one; this section constitutes our “home” in the universe; a technically advanced civilization, with knowledge of pulsars, could interpret the plaque.

At the bottom is a schematic of the solar system, with the planets arranged according to their distance from the Sun and with an indication of the initial path of Pioneer 10.

Above the set, to the left, is shown, also with indications in binary system, the spin of a hydrogen molecule, the most common element in the universe.

The plate was designed and popularized by the American astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan and by the American astronomer Frank Drake. They were drawn by Linda Salzman Sagan.