Apr 152012
At the very end of tonight’s episode of The Simpsons, just before the end credits, we caught a brief glimpse of Pioneer 10 (or was it 11?), along with an extraterrestrial intently studying Carl Sagan’s famous golden plaque.
But wait a minute… stupid alien is holding the plaque upside-down. No wonder he can’t make sense of it.
And they didn’t get the shape of the RTG fins right. Can’t really blame them; way too many artistic depictions of Pioneer show the generators with the small, rectangular fins that, I believe, were on (non-nuclear) engineering mockups used during testing.