[Pioneer 10]

Provenance: NASA Office of Education, with tag to base and indication on case.

Pioneer 10, the first all-nuclear electrical powered spacecraft, was launched March 2, 1972. Although sent on a 21-month mission to fly by the planet Jupiter, it continued for more than 30 years transmitting its last signal to Earth on January 23, 2003 from 7.6 billion miles away. It had, years earlier, after becoming the first spacecraft to fly by Jupiter, become the first human-made object to depart the Solar System when it crossed Neptune's orbit in June 1983.

The scientific instruments aboard the 569-pound spacecraft include an Imaging Photopolarimeter; Helium Vector Magnetometer (HVM); Infrared Adiometer; Quadrispherical Plasma Analyzer; Ultraviolet Photometer; Charged Particle Instrument (CPI); Cosmic Ray Telescope (CRT); Geiger Tube Telescope (GTT); Sisyphus Asteroid/Meteoroid Detector (AMD); Meteoroid Detectors; Trapped Radiation Detector (TRD). Pioneer 10 (and Pioneer 11) also contains a Carl Sagan-designed gold-anodized aluminum plaque in case it is ever found by intelligent life from another planetary system. The plaque features diagrams of a male and female figure as well as the Solar System and its location relative to 14 pulsars.

The probe continues to coast through space, headed in a much different direction than that of the Voyager probes and of Pioneer 11. It heads toward the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of the constellation Taurus. It's expected to pass the star in two million years.

The present model was one of very few produced and was used for education at NASA.