When was Pioneer 11 launched and by what rocket?
Pioneer 11 launched on the 6th of April 1973, at 02:11:00 UTC, from Space Launch Complex 36A at Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard an Atlas-Centaur rocket with a Star-37E propulsion module.
Questions about Pioneer 11
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What was Pioneer 11 the first spacecraft to do?
Pioneer 11 was the first spacecraft to encounter Saturn, passing 21,000 kilometers from its cloud tops on the 1st of September 1979. It was also the second probe to fly through the asteroid belt and the second to fly by Jupiter.
Why did Pioneer 11 fly through Saturn's ring plane at that specific position?
Mission planners directed Pioneer 11 through the exact ring-plane position that Voyager 2 would later need to cross on its way to Uranus and Neptune. If Pioneer 11 had been destroyed by ring debris, Voyager 2 could have been redirected to a safer path.
When did NASA lose contact with Pioneer 11?
Routine contact with Pioneer 11 ended on the 30th of September 1995. The last good engineering data was received on the 24th of November 1995, after which Earth moved out of view of the spacecraft's antenna.
What is the Pioneer anomaly and how was it explained?
The Pioneer anomaly was a small but unexplained acceleration of approximately 8.74 times ten to the negative-tenth meters per second squared directed toward the Sun, detected in radio tracking data from both Pioneer 10 and 11. Slava Turyshev and colleagues determined the cause was asymmetric thermal radiation and thermal recoil force acting on the face of the probes away from the Sun.
How far from Earth is Pioneer 11 now and where is it heading?
As of the 24th of June 2024, Pioneer 11 was estimated to be 113.121 AU from Earth, traveling at 11.155 kilometers per second relative to the Sun. It is heading toward the constellation Scutum and in approximately 928,000 years will pass within 0.25 parsecs of the star TYC 992-192-1.