Out of this world.
I (very) often return to the idea that the internet connects everything, and that this tendency to connect things is one of its central and defining characteristics. And because I often make this point I suppose that I can be allowed to bring contradictory evidence, or at least acknowledge a crack in that "everything". Which brings me to this month's date tie-in. It was on this date, in 2003, that contact with the exploratory space capsule Pioneer 10 was lost. Launched in March of 1972, the capsule flew by Jupiter, relaying important information about the planet back to earth, and then, as Wikipedia reports, Pioneer 10:
became the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity from the Solar System
When This Day in Tech History devoted a page to this event, they wrote:
Pioneer 10 is heading in the direction of the star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus at roughly 2.6 AU per year. If Aldebaran had zero relative velocity, it would take Pioneer 10 about 2 million years to reach it.
To the best of what I've been able to ascertain, that page was posted on 2011, which means that as of the posting of this column the capsule might reach Aldebaran in a bit less than those "about 2 million years".
Pioneer 10 has an additional claim to fame. As its launch was being planned it was clear that this would be the first man-made object to venture outside of our solar system. For that reason Eric Burgess, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, approached Carl Sagan with the proposal of attaching a plaque to the capsule with information about earth so that in the event that sometime in the future extra-terrestrial beings would find the capsule they could learn about who had sent it into space. The plaque was attached - though to the best of my knowledge it hasn't yet been found. For the two Voyager spacecraft of 1977 the idea of the plaque was further developed, and a special disc (and disc player) was attached to the capsules with photographs and sounds about earth. These can be found, and explained, in a wonderful book by Sagan and his associates Murmurs of Earth.
Go to: Making Jack dull.