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Artist's depiction of Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter. The exploration of Jupiter has been conducted via close observations by automated spacecraft.It began with the arrival of Pioneer 10 into the Jovian system in 1973, and, as of 2024, has continued with eight further spacecraft missions in the vicinity of Jupiter and two more en route.
The spacecraft was traveling at 17.043 km/s (10.590 mi/s) relative to the Sun. At this rate, it would need about 17,565 years at this speed to travel a single light-year. [76] To compare, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, is about 4.2 light-years (2.65 × 10 5 AU) distant. If the spacecraft was traveling in the direction of that ...
Pioneer 10 – launched in 1972, flew past Jupiter in 1973 and is heading in the direction of Aldebaran (65 light years away) in the constellation of Taurus.Contact was lost in January 2003, and it is estimated to have passed 134 astronomical units (AU; one AU is roughly the average distance between Earth and the Sun: 150 million kilometers (93 million miles)).
It used repeated gravity assists from Venus to develop an eccentric orbit, approaching within 9.86 solar radii (6.9 million km or 4.3 million miles) [7] [8] from the center of the Sun. At its closest approach in 2024, its speed relative to the Sun was 690,000 km/h (430,000 mph) or 191 km/s (118.7 mi/s), which is 0.064% the speed of light.
In October 2018, just months after its launch, it broke the record of being the closest a human-made object has ever gotten to the sun, at 26.55 million miles -- a record previously set in 1976 by ...
The uncrewed spacecraft flew at 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 kilometers per hour), which is fast enough to reach Tokyo from Washington, DC, in under a minute, according to NASA.
The spacecraft passed 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) from the solar surface on Dec. 24, flying into the sun's outer atmosphere called the corona, on a mission to help scientists learn more ...
New Horizons received a gravity assist from Jupiter, with its closest approach at 05:43:40 UTC on February 28, 2007, when it was 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Jupiter. The flyby increased New Horizons ' speed by 4 km/s (14,000 km/h; 9,000 mph), accelerating the probe to a velocity of 23 km/s (83,000 km/h; 51,000 mph) relative ...