PIONEER NEAR JUPITER

20" X 15" by Rick Sternbach, 1976. Original acrylic painting on illustration board.

NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 are twin probes that helped illuminate the outer stretches of our solar neighborhood. Though the missions launched about a year apart and had different trajectories, together they accomplished a number of historical feats: Pioneer 10 provided unprecedented insight into the asteroid belt and performed the first flyby of Jupiter, while Pioneer 11 was the first spacecraft to perform a flyby of Saturn.

NASA no longer has contact with either spacecraft, but both probes have continued to voyage deeper into space. Both Pioneer 10 and 11 are on trajectories that will eventually take them out of the solar system entirely, each carrying a map back to Earth should any intelligent life ever intercept them.