Pioneer 11 was the second mission to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system and the first to explore the planet Saturn and its main rings. Pioneer 11 (also called Pioneer G), unlike Pioneer 10 which only visited Jupiter, used Jupiter's mass in a gravitational slingshot to alter its trajectory toward Saturn. It passed close to Saturn and then it followed an escape trajectory from the solar system.

The spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral on April 6, 1973. It is 2.9 meters long and has a 2.74-meter-diameter antenna. The spacecraft had two thermoelectric generators that generated about 100Watts of electric power. Three pairs of rocket thrusters provided spin-axis control and change of the spacecraft's velocity. The thrusters could be either fired steadily or pulsed, by command.

Instruments on the spacecraft studied the interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields, solar wind properties, cosmic rays, and neutral hydrogen neutral abundance, and carried  imaging photopolarimeter which produced photographs.

Astronautics faculty Prof. Darrell Judge led designing and building the spacecraft instrument measuring ultraviolet radiation in space.

Image of Saturn collected by Pioneer 11 in Sept, 1979

The Deep Net Tracking Station Antenna (70 meter diameter)