Celestia Forums

Hey all

Heres another HGI-converted xyz trajectory & model... It's Pioneer 6 & 7! (Unfortunately neither trajectory is REALLY accurate, and #7 has a few missing bits... They give a good general impression of the orbits though)

Pioneer 6 & 7 (and 8 & 9 too) were identical probes launched by the US in the 60's to study the solar wind. For more info on the two probes you can look at:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/Mas ... =1965-105A
(Pioneer 6) and

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/Mas ... =1966-075A
(Pioneer 7)

One interesting fact about Pioneer 6...

Although the spacecraft has not been regularly tracked for science data return in recent years, a successful telemetry contact was made on 8 Dec. 2000 to celebrate 35 years of continuous operation since launch.

Dunno about #7 still being operational or not...

You can download the xyz's and model from the spacecraft page on my site http://homepage.eircom.net/~jackcelestia/ but have a look at some screenshots first...






Enjoy!

Jack, you really have amazed me this time.how do you comeout with all of these models so quickly?!?

Well there was a couple of weeks there where I didn't bring out anything new- that's when I was working on this... I was also working on the trajectory conversion thing that I mentioned in the Mariner 2 post in those few weeks.

Theres one more old craft to come- i'll probably put it up tonight, and then there won't be anything else for ages...

Why?

SCHOOL

S'not all bad though I spose...