Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Actual production was in the hands of husky young (31) George Ludwig, a graduate student who has proved himself a mechanical genius in the painstaking new art of space instrumentation. Each ounce counts, because it costs many thousands of dollars to put each ounce into orbit. The tiny, buglike components must stand enormous g forces, vibration and spin, survive violent changes of temperature...
Mysterious Silence. On Jan. 31, 1958, a Jupiter-C, fired from Cape Canaveral, put Explorer I into a fine orbit. With two massive Sputniks to compete with, the U.S. pinned its hopes for outdoing the Russians on the superiority of Van Allen's instruments...
...launched successfully on March 26. It contained a modified version of Ludwig's tape recorder-an amazing little instrument full of tiny, glittering parts that weighed only 8 oz. If it worked, it would gush out in five seconds all the cosmic-ray data from an entire orbit...
With his fine-honed skill in maneuvering, Van Allen took advantage of Project Argus to advance his own studies. He proposed the launching of a new satellite in a more north-and-south orbit than any of its predecessors. Moving in this way, he explained, it would better observe the results of Project Argus. Incidentally, it would also give him coverage of the natural radiation belt in latitudes that earlier satellites had not reached...
Explorer IV went into a 51° orbit on July 26. It carried sophisticated instruments that Van Allen's laboratory had provided to distinguish between "hard" and "soft" radiation, and shielded Geiger counters designed to count radiation intensity at extremely high levels without blacking out. On Aug. 27 the first Argus shot sent man-made electrons zigzagging round the earth. The satellite cut through them back and forth, making about 250 passes before its batteries were exhausted on Sept...