The TRW Inc.-built spacecraft was the first and is now the lone survivor of a series of four identical spacecraft launched between 1965 and 1968. (A fifth, launched in 1969, failed to reach orbit.) NASA last tracked Pioneer 6 in October 1997.
Over the course of its 35-year life, the spin-stabilized probe has maintained a remarkably stable orbit, said Robert Ryan, the Pioneer operations coordinator at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"Always in the past, when we made an attempt, the spacecraft is right where navigation tells us it will be," said Ryan, who joined the Pioneer team in 1966.
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The drum-shaped spacecraft was launched on a Thor-Delta rocket on Dec. 16, 1965. That days papers carried news of U.S. planes bombing North Vietnam, the death of author Somerset Maugham at age 91 and the successful orbital rendezvous of the Gemini 6 and 7 spacecraft a feat that paved the way for the first Apollo moon landing four years later.
Since then, Pioneer has steadily orbited the Sun at a mean distance of 0.8 AU, or 74 million miles (119 million kilometers). Spinning 60 times a minute, the 139-pound (63-kilogram) probe basks in the Suns rays; its solar arrays providing 79 watts of power.
At last check, two of the six instruments aboard Pioneer 6 were still functioning and returning data outliving, in some cases, the scientists who had built them.
"Sometimes they say space is such a hostile environment, but sometimes its benign, too. If you dont do anything to cause a problem, it can just go on and on," Ryan said of Pioneer 6. "Its a rugged old bird that is always there."
While Pioneer 6 could last for years yet, NASAs next-oldest spacecraft,
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