When its Atlas Centaur rocket rose from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36A at 8:49 P.M. EST on March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10 started knocking down records right off the bat. It became the fastest human-made object to leave our planet, barreling away from Earth at 32,000 mph (51,500 km/h) and passing the Moon within its first half-day of flight. The craft was brimming with detectors for plasma and charged particles; cosmic-ray and Geiger-tube telescopes; asteroid, meteoroid and radiation sensors; infrared and ultraviolet scanners; an imaging photopolarimeter; and a magnetometer. To provide power in a realm where sunlight grew progressively weaker, Pioneer 10 carried four plutonium generators as the world’s first nuclear-powered deep-space probe.
After traveling for 641 days, at 9:25 P.M. EST on Dec. 3, 1973, the probe swept just 82,178 miles (132,253 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops to reveal a colorful, stormy world of striking latitudinal belts and zones of vivid reds, creams, and browns. Forty-six minutes later, its first data reached the eyes and ears of the Pioneer 10 team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. “So deluged were Pioneer scientists with transmissions of the spacecraft’s instruments,” opined the Washington Post, “they were literally changing their minds about Jupiter’s physics and chemistry every hour.”
