Pioneer 10 became the first craft to leave the planets behind
On this day · 13 June 1983
On June 13, 1983, NASA's Pioneer 10 crossed Neptune's orbit, becoming the first human-made object to travel beyond the planets.
Launched in 1972, NASA’s Pioneer 10 was built to do things nothing had done before. It became the first spacecraft to fly through the main asteroid belt, the first to fly past Jupiter, and the first placed on a trajectory to escape the solar system entirely.
On June 13, 1983, it crossed the orbit of Neptune, then the outermost planet from the Sun, since Pluto was temporarily nearer. With that crossing, Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to travel beyond the planets, heading silently into interstellar space.
The little probe kept talking for two more decades. NASA tracked it until 1997, and engineers caught a final faint signal on January 23, 2003, from more than seven billion miles away.
It carries a gold plaque etched with a map to Earth, a message for whatever might one day find it.
Pioneer 10 still drifts toward the star Aldebaran, a journey of over two million years.
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