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77 seconds after lifting off Pioneer 0 (which was not even built by NASA) explodes and fails its initial mission to televise imagaes of the moon to earth. Following this incident the US officials tranferred the Spacecraft responsibility over to nasa as opposed to the US Air Force.
http://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/pioneer-012.htm -
Pioneer 1 was the second of three project able space probes. It became the first spacecraft lauched by NASA. The spacecraft was created to study the ionizing radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and micrometerorites in lunar orbit around the earth. The spacecraft returned data about the near earth envionment even though it never reached the moon due to a trajectory error.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1958-007A -
Pioneer 4 becomes the 1st us spacecraft to enter orbit around the sun. Additionally, it sent back data on radiation in space and photographs of the moon before its signal was offiacially lost on March 6 1959.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/profile.cfm?Sort=Planet&Object=Moon&Mission=Pioneer_04 -
Pioneder 5 studided space between the orbits of Earth and Venus.
http://historicspacecraft.com/Probes_Pioneer.html -
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The material in the asteriod belt travels at about 20 km/second and some chunks of it are the size of the US State of Alaska. The belt itself is around 80km thick; nevertheless, Pioneer 10 made it out safely rather shortly.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/missions/archive/pioneer.html#.UrD0Z_RDtjQ -
Pioneer 11 blasts off at cape canaveral, later on it will orbit dangerousley close to Jupitar and through some of satern's outermost rings.
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Sorry but the actual date of the lauch is unknown for now. The first two voyager spacecrafts were lauched by this time and mandeged to travel by Jupitar, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune by the year 1989.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-278 -
Voyager 2 captured plenty of images of Jupitar as well as it's moons. Cracks on the icy surface of Europa and volcanism on Io were revealed by these photos. But the mission was riskey, as Voyager 2 came within 570000km of Jupitars cloud tops.
http://www.universetoday.com/73563/voyager-2/
