of the outer atmosphere to be measured, showing a temperature inversion between the altitudes with 10 and 100 mbar pressures. Temperatures at the 10 mbar level ranged from , while temperatures at the 100 mbar level were . The spacecraft generated an infrared map of the planet, which confirmed the idea that the planet radiated more heat than it received from the Sun. Crescent images of the planet were then returned as Pioneer 10 moved away from the planet. As the spacecraft headed outward, it again passed the bow shock of Jupiter's magnetosphere. 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. Deep space Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Saturn in 1976 and the orbit of Uranus in 1979. On June 13, 1983, the craft crossed the orbit of Neptune, at that time the outermost planet, and so became the first human-made object to leave the proximity of the major planets of the Solar System. The mission came to an official end on March 31, 1997, when it had reached a distance of from the Sun, though the spacecraft was still able to transmit coherent data after this date. After March 31, 1997, Pioneer 10's weak signal continued to be tracked by the Deep Space Network to aid the training of flight controllers in the process of acquiring deep-space radio signals. There was an Advanced Concepts study applying chaos theory to extract coherent data from the fading signal. 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 final, very weak signal from Pioneer 10 was received on January 23, 2003, when it was from Earth. Further attempts to contact the spacecraft were unsuccessful. A final attempt was made on the evening of March 4, 2006, the last time the antenna would be correctly aligned with Earth. No response was received from Pioneer 10. NASA decided that the RTG units had probably fallen below the power threshold needed to operate the transmitter. Hence, no further attempts at contact were made. Timeline Current status and future On January 20, 2023, Pioneer 10 was predicted to be from the Earth, and traveling at (relative to the Sun) and traveling outward