Pioneer 10

Pioneer 10 flight hardware under construction, December 1971 The big dish dominates the spacecraft because everything depended on talking to Earth from hundreds of millions of miles away. Launched in March 1972, Pioneer 10 was the first probe to cross the asteroid belt and the first to fly past Jupiter, in December 1973. It carried a gold-anodized plaque showing a man, a woman and Earth's place in the galaxy, in case anyone ever finds it.