Word: minitrack
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...even Walter Mitty. He is a thrill-seeking visitor at Northridge, outside Los Angeles, one of seven sites in California where anyone with a driver's license and a few dollars can safely savor some of the adrenaline-pumping, gut-clutching fever of Grand Prix racing-on a minitrack, in a scaled-down Formula 1 speedster. Le petit Grand Prix is already one of the hottest pastimes in California, the nation's begetter of vogues, and is spreading east. The two businessmen who laid out the first track in Malibu 29 months ago have since sold their company...
...drum record radiation from both sun and sky as the drum spins, and a neutron counter catches neutrons bounced up from the earth's atmosphere by the impact of cosmic rays. All the readings are recorded on tape during each orbit. When OSO passes over a Minitrack radio station, it is given a signal that makes the tape reverse its motion and quickly send its data down to earth...
...immediate superior, Dr. John P. Hagen, director of Project Vanguard. The same line was connected to telephones manned in the White House by Press Secretary James Hagerty and Presidential Aide Andy Goodpaster, ready to pass the word to Ike. "T minus ten," said Walsh. "Clear sky on launching complex . . . Minitrack clear." Pete Aurand took a horseshoe from a paper sack, spit on it, tossed it over his shoulder...
This left the main burden of the early tracking operations up to the Naval Research Laboratories, located in Washington, which by prior arrangement was to attempt to get a "fix" on the satellite by radio. It had established special "Minitrack" stations across the country for this purpose. Unfortunately, however, these stations were geared to receive signals on 108 megacycles, the frequency the Russians had promised to use in their satellite's transmitter. They had to be completely overhauled in order to pick up the 20 and 40 megacycle signals which the Soviets decided to use instead...
United States tracking operations for the second "moon" will meanwhile be based on information from radio contacts, primarily those made by the Naval Research Laboratory's minitrack stations...