Talk:Pioneer 4

Untitled

Some sources claim Pioneer-4 failed, others say it succeeded. It did not get anywhere near as close to the Moon as hoped, so it is a matter of semantics whether it "missed the Moon" or "passed nearby the Moon". DonPMitchell 21:31, 28 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Launch date

This shoudl be checked. The article says it was launched at 17:11 UTC. Siddiqi's chronology of space probes says 05:10:45. A reputable Soviet article gives the time as 22:25 UTC. So it seems we do not really konw when Pioneer 4 was launched. DonPMitchell (talk) 22:09, 7 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This article says the following: "Launch Date: 1959-03-03 at 17:11:00 UTC".

This article (same NASA website) says the following: "The probe passed within 60,000 km of the Moon's surface (7.2 E, 5.7 S) on 4 March 1959 at 22:25 UT (5:25 p.m. EST) at a speed of 7,230 km/hr."

So that's probably where the 22:25 came from, although it is not the launch date. Cheers, Van der Hoorn (talk • contribs) 13:09, 9 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Launching vehicle section

" a rotating tub" - is that a technical term or a typo? Peridon (talk) 22:04, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mission objective: Flyby or impact?

I removed an implicit mention of a lunar impact as a mission objective for Pioneer 4. NASA sources make no mention of this. Instead, they speak of a flyby as the main objective. --Mtu (talk) 01:54, 17 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Smithsonian flight spare

They released some fairly clean pics under CC0

https://www.si.edu/object/satellite-pioneer-iv:nasm_A19620018000