Celestia Forums

It's really too bad that the pioneer probes weren't fitted with even the most basic of hobbiest level telescopes... They're so far out from either side of the sun totally opposite eachother that if they had telescopes we could use them to get a better idea about how nebulas look in three dimensions for better modeling in Celestia...

Does anybody know if NASA or any othe ragencies plan to send another two or maybe more probes really far out there like that for getting a better triangulation on celestial bodies?

Unfortunately, the Pioneer probes are so close to Earth (in cosmic terms) that there would be no perceptible difference in the appearance of distant nebulae.

- Hank

Brina1,

While the distances that the Pioneer probes have travelled would give a very good baseline for optical interferometry, the precision electronics and optics simply weren't available when they were designed.

The ESA will be launching a successor to the Hipparcos satellite in a few years, hopefully by 2010-2012. The GAIA satellite will be able to do parallax measurements to a small fraction of a milli-arc-second. They're hoping to measure stellar distances with about 100x more precision and to a limiting magnitude about 1000x fainter, for about 10,000 times as many stars as Hipparcos did. (See http://astro.estec.esa.nl/GAIA/science/astrometry_summary.html and http://www.astro.lu.se/~lennart/Astrometry/GAIA_res.html.)

While directly measuring the distances of nebulae won't be possible, they will be measuring the distances to many of the stars responsible for making them glow, which is almost as good.