Pioneer 10 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 artificial objects to achieve the escape velocity that will allow them to leave the Solar System. This space exploration project was conducted by the NASA Ames Research Center in California, and the space probe was manufactured by TRW Inc. "Pioneer 10" was assembled around a hexagonal bus with a diameter parabolic dish high-gain antenna, and the spacecraft was spin stabilized around the axis of
Exploration of Jupiter impacts took place on the side of Jupiter hidden from Earth, "Galileo", then at a distance of 1.6 AU from the planet, was able to see the impacts as they occurred. Its instruments detected a fireball that reached a peak temperature of about 24,000 K, compared to the typical Jovian cloudtop temperature of about 130 K (−143 °C), with the plume from the fireball reaching a height of over 3,000 km. An atmospheric probe was released from the spacecraft in July 1995, entering the planet's atmosphere on December 7, 1995. After a high-g descent into the Jovian atmosphere, the probe