Things That Outlast Their Purpose
Vanguard 1. Telstar 1. Pioneer 10. Three objects still moving through space — long after anyone stopped listening.
Three objects. Three different definitions of gone.
Vanguard 1 — launched March 17, 1958. A grapefruit-sized sphere of aluminum and magnesium, 1.46 kg. Last signal received May 1964. It is still up there. Orbital period: 134.27 minutes. Estimated to remain in orbit for another 240 years.
Telstar 1 — launched July 10, 1962. The first privately funded satellite. It relayed the first live transatlantic television signal. On July 9, 1962 — one day before its launch — the United States detonated a thermonuclear warhead 400 km above the Pacific. The resulting radiation belt degraded Telstar's transistors. By February 1963, it was silent. It remains in orbit at 952–5,632 km altitude, circling once every 157.8 minutes.
Pioneer 10 — launched March 2, 1972. The first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt and make direct observations of Jupiter. Last confirmed signal: January 23, 2003. At that point, it was 80 AU from Earth. Today it is approximately 141.82 AU away — roughly 21.2 billion kilometers — moving at 11.9 km/s toward the red star Aldebaran. It carries a gold-anodized aluminum plaque: two figures of a man and a woman, a diagram of our solar system, a map to Earth made of pulsar distances.
No one is listening for it anymore.
This series documents the things we left behind.
このコンテンツについて、さらに観点や背景を補足しましょう。