In the 1960s, American aerospace engineer Gary Flandro of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory conceived of a mission, known as the Planetary Grand Tour, that would exploit a rare alignment of the outer planets of the Solar System.

They formed part of the Pioneer program,[11] a series of United States uncrewed space missions launched between 1958 and 1978.

[6] NASA Ames Research Center, rather than Goddard, was selected to manage the project as part of the Pioneer program.

In February 1970, Ames awarded a combined US$380 million contract to TRW Inc. for building both of the Pioneer 10 and 11 vehicles, bypassing the usual bidding process to save time.

"[15] To meet the schedule, the first launch would need to take place between February 29 and March 17 so that it could arrive at Jupiter in November 1974.

This was later revised to an arrival date of December 1973 in order to avoid conflicts with other missions over the use of the Deep Space Network for communications, and to miss the period when Earth and Jupiter would be at opposite sides of the Sun.

The encounter trajectory for Pioneer 10 was selected to maximize the information returned about the radiation environment around Jupiter, even if this caused damage to some systems.

A layer of insulation, consisting of aluminized mylar and kapton blankets, provides passive thermal control.

[6]: 44–45  The generators are powered by the radioisotope fuel plutonium-238, which is housed in a multi-layer capsule protected by a graphite heat shield.

The parabolic dish for the high-gain antenna is 2.74 meters (9.0 ft) in diameter and made from an aluminum honeycomb sandwich material.

Data to be transmitted is passed through a convolutional encoder so that most communication errors could be corrected by the receiving equipment on Earth.

[3] Much of the computation for the mission is performed on Earth and transmitted to the spacecraft, where it was able to retain in memory up to five commands of the 222 possible entries by ground controllers.

The magnetometer consists of a helium-filled cell mounted on a 6.6 m boom to partly isolate the instrument from the spacecraft's magnetic field.

[22] Peers through a hole in the large dish-shaped antenna to detect particles of the solar wind originating from the Sun.

[26] Surveys the intensities, energy spectra, and angular distributions of electrons and protons along the spacecraft's path through the radiation belts of Jupiter.

[28] Twelve panels of pressurized cell detectors mounted on the back of the main dish antenna record penetrating impacts of small meteoroids.

[29] Meteoroid-asteroid detector look into space with four non-imaging telescopes to track particles ranging from close by bits of dust to distant large asteroids.

The on-board instruments underwent checkouts, with the photometers examining Jupiter and the Zodiacal light, and experiment packages being used to measure cosmic rays, magnetic fields and the solar wind.

[42] Red and blue pictures of Jupiter were being generated by the imaging photopolarimeter as the rotation of the spacecraft carried the instrument's field of view past the planet.

These were being displayed in real-time back on Earth, and the Pioneer program would later receive an Emmy award for this presentation to the media.

[46] The level of radiation at Jupiter was ten times more powerful than Pioneer's designers had predicted, leading to fears that the probe would not survive.

[47] The trajectory of Pioneer 10 was chosen to take it behind Io, allowing the refractive effect of the moon's atmosphere on the radio transmissions to be measured.

[47] It was not until after Pioneer 10 had cleared the asteroid belt that NASA selected a trajectory towards Jupiter which included a slingshot effect to send the spacecraft out of the Solar System.

As this front is constantly shifting in space because of dynamic interaction with the solar wind, the vehicle crossed the bow shock a total of 17 times before it escaped completely.

[54] On June 13, 1983, the craft crossed the orbit of Neptune, and so became the first human-made object to leave the proximity of the major planets of the Solar System.

[55] The last successful reception of telemetry was received from Pioneer 10 on April 27, 2002; subsequent signals were barely strong enough to detect and provided no usable data.

The Pioneer 10 trajectory is expected to take it in the general direction of the star Aldebaran, currently located at a distance of about 68 light years.

[66] This is the closest stellar flyby in the next few million years of all the Pioneer, Voyager, and New Horizons spacecraft, which are leaving the Solar System.

A backup unit, Pioneer H, is currently on display in the "Milestones of Flight" gallery at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.[67] Many elements of the mission proved to be critical in the planning of the Voyager program.

The plaques feature the nude figures of a human male and female along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft.