Video: 'KUMV Night Report news 1983'

(Monday, June 13, 1983, 8:00 a.m. EDT) — The U.S. space probe Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to leave the vicinity of the major planets of the Solar System today as it crossed the orbit of Neptune, at that time the outermost planet, 11 years after it was launched in 1972.

The 570-pound robot craft was 2.81 billion miles from the Sun and traveling 30,558 miles an hour at the time of the historic crossing.

This space exploration project was conducted by the NASA Ames Research Center in California. The space probe was manufactured by TRW Inc.

Video: 'Pioneer 10: Our First View into Outer Planets'

The mission came to an official end on March 31, 1997, when it had reached a distance of 67 AU (6.2 billion mi; 10.0 billion km) from the Sun, though the spacecraft was still able to transmit coherent data after this date.

After March 31, 1997, Pioneer 10’s weak signal continued to be tracked by the Deep Space Network to aid the training of flight controllers in the process of acquiring deep-space radio signals. There was an Advanced Concepts study applying chaos theory to extract coherent data from the fading signal.

Radio communications were lost with Pioneer 10 on Jan. 23, 2003, because of the loss of electric power for its radio transmitter, with the probe at a distance of 12 billion kilometers (80 AU) from Earth.