Old Faithful : 20 Years After Launch, Pioneer 6 Keeps on Ticking

America’s deep space network of powerful antennas will search the solar system next Monday for an old workhorse that continues to talk to an Earth that no longer listens.

The occasion will be the 20th anniversary of the launching of Pioneer 6, the nation’s oldest functioning spacecraft. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration hopes to lock its antennas onto the barrel-shaped craft for about 90 minutes, but the event will be primarily ceremonial.

It will be NASA’s way of paying homage to a remnant of an age when scientists played more by the gut than by the computer.

The Pioneer craft was supposed to last six months. Although its functions have been usurped by newer instruments, it is still sending back data on the sun.

No one listens anymore because the antennas that are needed to receive Pioneer 6’s weak signals are too busy with more pressing matters to pay much attention to a space antique.

So Pioneer 6 continues its vigil unheeded. It has been more than a year since anyone tuned in to see what it had to say.

At about midnight Monday, the antennas of NASA’s deep space network will be aimed at Pioneer 6, which is in about the same orbit as the Earth but on the opposite side of the sun.

“We have a short track of about 90 minutes,” said Richard Fimmel, Pioneer project manager for Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. “We just couldn’t spare more time (with the antennas). . . . We’ll probably have a little coffee and cake and toast Pioneer 6 for its longevity and faithful service. It’s quite remarkable that it would survive that long.”

It’s also somewhat of a surprise to the man who guided the project at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach.

“In those days we were amazed when we just got off the launch pad,” said Aubrey C. Mickelwait, TRW’s retired program manager for the Pioneer series of space probes.

Not only did the craft get off the pad, it remains in reasonably good condition. Long ago it ran out of nitrogen gas used for positioning, and its solar cell collectors have deteriorated to the point that it no longer has the electricity to run all of its instruments. But when last checked a year ago, all but one of its six experiments were still operating, according to a TRW spokesman.

Under terms of its government contract, TRW was required to build a spacecraft that would last at least six months in order to receive full payment. It turns out that the benign environment of space, coupled with engineering that was better than expected for those days, resulted in a vehicle of surprising durability.

Although the craft was used for many years, TRW received no more in payment than it would have had it died in six months, leading some of Mickelwait’s colleagues to chastise him for doing too good of a job.

“They figured there might have been some more contracts out there if it hadn’t lasted so long,” he said. Pioneer 6 is the oldest of four spacecraft orbited to give scientists their first chance to study the far side of the sun. That was particularly important when manned space flight was in its infancy.

Solar storms have a dramatic effect on weather patterns on Earth, and they send off radiation that would be lethal without the protective shield of the Earth’s atmosphere. That posed serious problems for scientists planning manned space missions because solar storms could endanger astronauts in space, and especially on the surface of the moon.

Looking for Storms

“We didn’t want to send astronauts to the moon at a time when they would be exposed to lethal radiation from the sun,” Fimmel said.

Because the sun rotates once every 27 days, a spacecraft on the opposite side of the sun could warn of an approaching solar storm 15 to 17 days in advance. That became one of the primary objectives of the Pioneer program.

Although the Pioneers might be judged somewhat crude by today’s standards, they were a marvel in their day.

“The things we do routinely now, we discovered then,” said Mickelwait, 60. “It was fun, because we didn’t know what we were doing. My grandkids don’t realize how new it all was.”

In the earliest days of the space program, it was not unusual to drive down to the local hardware store to buy materials to improvise modifications on spacecraft about to be launched.

“In those days, you played much higher risks,” Mickelwait said.

He said that during one of the early launches, engineers bought fishing line and sinkers to attach to a third stage booster so that it would tumble quickly after separation and would not hit the spacecraft and knock it off course.

“It worked,” he said.

But a lot of things did not work.

‘We Hit a Cow’

“We dropped a second stage (rocket) into Cuba once,” Mickelwait said, recalling a rocket that had to be destroyed when it veered off course. “I think we hit a cow or something.”

On another launch, in about 1960, “we dropped an engine into South Africa.”

The giant bureaucracy that now employs thousands to govern the space program was nowhere in sight in those early days.

“I remember one launch when we had three government guys there to see it,” Mickelwait said. “I didn’t know what NASA was.”

As he tells it today, it is amazing that Pioneer 6 did not land in the drink after it was launched from Cape Canaveral. Moments before the “launch window” was to open on Dec. 16, 1965, “someone accidentally pulled the umbilical” that linked the rocket to its ground support system. That left the rocket with a mind of its own, and ground crews had no way of knowing what it was about to do.

“At that stage, that thing is a bomb,” Mickelwait said.

“They found a volunteer who ran out to the pad and plugged the cord back in. But everything was so confused.”

Bewildering Launch

He said that at one point he was so bewildered that when someone asked him if he wanted to go ahead with the launch, he just shrugged his shoulders.

He still remembers the launch director yelling, “Would you mind telling me what you are doing?”

Meanwhile, fog began rolling in and the launch window began to close. Finally, the Delta rocket fired to life.

“The feeling was, let’s get this damn thing off the ground,” Mickelwait recalled.

For five minutes, no one knew whether the launch was a success.

Finally, a voice from a tracking station on the tip of South Africa came over the speakers: “We have a signal.”

“That was the greatest moment of my life, “ Mickelwait said. Today, no one doubts that Pioneer 6 was a success.

‘Celestial Home Run’

It was followed by Pioneers 7, 8 and 9, all of which orbited the sun, and still later by Pioneers 10 and 11 on very different missions. In June of 1983, Pioneer 10, then 2.7 billion miles away, left the solar system forever, becoming what historian Walter McDougall called “mankind’s first celestial home run.”

Pioneer 1 was to have been the first spacecraft to orbit the moon, but it reached only 71,300 miles and plunged back to Earth. Pioneers 2 through 5 also failed in their missions, but each helped scientists learn a little more about space technology.

Today, Mickelwait would like to add just one more footnote to the Pioneer program:

“I sure would like to find that volunteer” who put the cord back in Pioneer 6.