Word: got
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
First Beep. With this work well underway and no satellite launching expected for some time, Van Allen was not a man to sit around idly. He got aboard the Navy icebreaker Glacier and headed for Antarctica to measure cosmic rays near the South Magnetic Pole. On Oct. 4, when the Glacier was wallowing southward across the Pacific, a report that the Russians had launched a satellite came over the ship's radio. Van Allen went to work on the Glacier's 20-mc. receiver, and within half an hour it yielded vigorous beeping sounds. That was Sputnik...
...free world was crying for U.S. satellite action. But the Vanguard program still sputtered and faltered. Suddenly, Van Allen got a radio message from Pickering. The Army had at last got permission to try its satellite. He asked if Van Allen would approve transfer of his instruments to Jupiter...
...region, where the satellite was rising to its highest point, the counting rates were much smaller. During some two-minute stretches there were no counts at all. Says Van Allen: "My first thought was, 'Great guns! Something's gone wrong with the apparatus!' But then we got later North American tapes and everything seemed normal again...
...March 28 Van Allen got the first tape and sat up all night poring over it. The cosmic-ray count seemed reasonable as long as the bird was at low altitude. When it climbed upward, the rate increased rapidly. Then, for some unaccountable reason, the count fell to nothing, stayed at nothing until the bird was back at lower altitude again...
...Russians' three massive Sputniks had reported the Van Allen radiation. One theory is that the Russians outsmarted themselves by refusing to tell the outside world how to interpret signals from their satellites. Since only the low parts of the Sputnik orbits were over Soviet territory, Russian scientists never got reports from high altitudes. If any of the Sputniks carried tape recorders, they apparently did not work...