Pioneer 10 (originally designated Pioneer F) is a 258-kilogram robotic space probe that completed the first interplanetary mission to Jupiter, and became the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity from the Solar System. The project was managed by the NASA Ames Research Center and the spacecraft was constructed by TRW Inc. Pioneer 10 was assembled around a hexagonal bus with a 2.74 m parabolic dish high-gain antenna oriented along the spin axis. Power was supplied by four radioisotope thermoelectric generators that provided a combined 155 W at the start of the mission.

Pioneer 10 was launched on March 2, 1972 by an Atlas-Centaur expendable vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Between July 15, 1972, and February 15, 1973, it became the first spacecraft to traverse the asteroid belt. Imaging of Jupiter began November 6, 1973, at a range of 25 million km, and a total of more than 500 images were transmitted. The closest approach to the planet was on December 4, 1973, at a range of 132,252 km. During the mission, the on-board instruments were used to study the asteroid belt, the environment around Jupiter, solar wind, cosmic rays, and eventually the far reaches of the solar system and heliosphere. Communication was lost on January 23, 2003, due to power constraints, with the probe at a distance of 12 billion kilometers (80 AU) from Earth.

Hans Michael Mark (born June 17, 1929) is a former Secretary of the Air Force and a former Deputy Administrator of NASA. He is an expert and consultant in aerospace design and national defense policy. Mark is currently working in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mark was born in Mannheim, Germany. He lived in Vienna for a time before escaping the Nazi anschluss via Switzerland. Before the collapse of France the Mark family moved to London where they lived during the Battle of Britain and the bombing of London. Mark's father, Herman Francis Mark, a polymer chemist, soon took a position with a Canadian paper company, moving his family to Toronto. A short time later the family moved to the United States in 1940. After becoming an American citizen in 1945, he graduated from New York's Stuyvesant High School in 1947 and went on to receive a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1951 and a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1954.

Carl Edward Sagan ( /ˈseɪɡɪn/; November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He advocated scientifically skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Sagan is known for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. Sagan wrote the novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.

Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Ukrainian Jewish family. His father, Sam Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamenets-Podolsk, Ukraine; his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, a housewife. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew." Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1951.