Pioneer 11 Stories

Someone’s got to be first. In space, the first to explore beyond Mars were Pioneers 10 and 11, twin robots who charted the course to the cosmos.

A rare alignment of the outer planets in the late 1970s provided an opportunity to explore that part of the solar system with relative ease, using gravity assists to send spacecraft from one planet to the next. To take advantage…

NASA scientists have announced that they have contacted Pioneer 10, the plucky small spacecraft launched 29 years ago, ending speculation that its signal had finally fallen silent.

Charles (Charlie) F. Hall, manager of three of NASA's most daring and exciting early scientific space missions, died August 26 in a Mountain View, CA hospital following a brief illness.