Short answers, pulled from the story.
Pioneer 10 was launched on the 3rd of March 1972 at 01:49:00 UTC from Space Launch Complex 36A in Florida aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket. The third stage was a solid-fuel Star-37E stage developed specifically for the Pioneer missions, which accelerated the probe to 51,682 kilometers per hour.
Pioneer 10 made its closest approach to Jupiter on the 3rd of December 1973, passing within 132,252 kilometers of the planet's outer atmosphere. At that point, the spacecraft was traveling at 132,000 kilometers per hour.
Pioneer 10 received an integrated dose of 200,000 rads from electrons and 56,000 rads from protons as it passed through Jupiter's inner radiation belts. The radiation level was ten times stronger than the probe's designers had predicted; a whole-body dose of 500 rads is fatal to humans.
The final signal from Pioneer 10 was received on the 23rd of January 2003, when the probe was about 12 billion kilometers from Earth. A last attempt to contact the spacecraft was made on the evening of the 4th of March 2006, the final date when its antenna would be correctly aligned with Earth, but no response was received.
Pioneer 10 carries a 152 by 229 millimeter gold-anodized aluminum plaque, attached to the antenna support struts. It depicts the nude figures of a human male and female alongside symbols designed to indicate the spacecraft's origin. Carl Sagan strongly advocated for including the plaque in case Pioneer 10 was ever found by intelligent life from another planetary system.
As of July 2025, Pioneer 10 is estimated to be about 139.7 AU from Earth, traveling toward the constellation Taurus. Its trajectory is aimed in the general direction of the star Aldebaran, roughly 68 light years away, though it will take more than two million years to reach that vicinity.