When did NASA last receive a transmission from Pioneer 10?
Pioneer 10’s weak signal continued to be tracked by the Deep Space Network as part of a new advanced concept study of chaos theory. After 1997 the probe was used in the training of flight controllers on how to acquire radio signals from space. The last successful reception of telemetry was on April 27, 2002; subsequent signals were barely strong enough to detect. Loss of contact was probably due to a combination of increasing distance and the spacecraft’s steadily weakening power source, rather than structural failure of the craft. The last, very weak signal from Pioneer 10 was received on January 23, 2003, when it was 12 billion kilometers (7.5 billion miles) from Earth. A contact attempt on February 7, 2003 was not successful. One final attempt was made on the evening of March 4, 2006, the last time the antenna would be correctly aligned with Earth.
