Pioneer 10 and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The plaque is attached to the antenna support struts to provide some shielding from interstellar dust. In the film "", a Klingon ship destroys "Pioneer 10" as target practice. In the internet multimedia fiction project "17776", a sentient "Pioneer 10" is one of the main characters. Pioneer 10 Pioneer 10 (originally designated Pioneer F) is an American space probe, launched in 1972 and weighing , that completed the first mission to the planet Jupiter. Thereafter, "Pioneer 10" became the first of five
Surveyor 3 panspermia, but more importantly, it led NASA to adopt strict abiotic procedures for space probes to prevent contamination of the planet Mars and other astronomical bodies that are suspected of having conditions possibly suitable for life. Most dramatically, the "Galileo" space probe was deliberately destroyed at the end of its mission by crashing it into Jupiter, to avoid the possibility of contaminating the Jovian moon Europa with bacteria from Earth. The "Cassini" probe also impacted Saturn at the end of its mission in 2017. However, independent investigators have challenged the claim of surviving bacteria on Surveyor 3 on the Moon.