pioneer 10 left earth on 3rd march 1972, 35 days before i was born, and has travelled 12.2 billion kilometres since then. nasa received their final weak signal from the spacecraft on 22nd january 2003, 35 days ago, and don’t expect to hear anything else from it.

“Pioneer 10 was a pioneer in the true sense of the word,” said Colleen Hartman, director of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Division. “After it passed Mars on its long journey into deep space, it was venturing into places where nothing built by humanity had ever gone before.”

[found via megnut]