I have noticed this paper on possible Pioneer 11 support of the Voyager 2 Uranus encounter
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntr..._1984024336.pdf
Does anybody know whether NASA took advantage of this opportunity?
thanks
Paolo

I don't know of any paper published on this. Still, Pioneer-11 was sending such data back over the time period, so I imagine that an interested reseacher could take the issue up. I think it sad that Pioneer 11 wasn't sent on to Uranus and Neptune. It's imaging data would have probably been useless other than perhaps low to high phase photometry, but having particle and fields data from two passes would have proven invaluable. But, to be fair, even the Saturn encounter was a bonus, and no one envisioned Pioneer would last until 1985, much less into the 1990s.

Yes, it definitely returned data then. A look at plots produced here:

http://lewes.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/cohoweb...?spacecraft=p11

shows that it was a little patchy, especially plasma density, velocity, etc., but there's probably enough magnetic field data to directly compare with Voyager 2. As this was nearer solar minimum than maximum, most of the solar wind structure would have been corotating with the Sun, i.e. there wouldn't have been many CMEs producing localised disturbances. This would definitely make the comparison simplier.

The paper mentions the fact that Pioneer 11 tracking would be difficult since the largest DSN antennae would be dedicated to tracking Voyager (which was after all in almost the same spot in the sky). So what I am wondering is: was eventually data recovered from Pioneer 11 that could be used to support the Voyager encounter?