Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...William H. Pickering, director of the Army's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which developed the upper stages of the launching vehicle, says that the orbit is almost exactly the intended one. The only deviation is that the satellite goes a little higher than was expected. "A splendid orbit," says Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, who designed the instrument package for the satellite. "We are delighted with it." He points out that the principal scientific purpose of the Explorer is to study cosmic rays at various distances from the earth, and it could...
...that only people with very good eyesight, who live in favorable places, will ever see the Explorer with the naked eye. It is too small. In any case, says Dr. Fred Whipple, head of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, it will only be visible while its elliptical orbit is carrying it over the U.S. at low altitude. When the high part of the orbit has shifted over the U.S. the satellite will be too faint to be seen without instruments...
...Explorer stays up as long as expected, the slow shift of its orbit will give information about irregularities in the earth's gravitational field. Its radio signals, coming down through the atmosphere, by their fading and bending will describe ionized layers of air they have passed through. As the satellite spirals toward earth, very slowly at first, it will measure by its loss of energy the density of the air at the top of the atmosphere. It may even tell, merely by crossing the oceans at a known speed, how far the continents really are from each other...
According to Dr. Wernher von Braun, the same equipment plus a few more tricks can put 50% more weight on orbit. But he and other Army men point out that the Redstone is a comparatively small rocket, not nearly so powerful as the ones that launched the Russian Sputniks, or as military rockets-Atlas, Thor, etc.-now being tested in the U.S. Dr. Jack E. Froelich of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that the Army's Jupiter rocket (not to be confused with the Jupiter-C) could boost a much bigger satellite into an orbit, or even send...
...thrust, twelve times the power of the souped-up Redstone. Meanwhile, said Dr. von Braun, a second Jupiter-C is being made into a satellite launcher. Some time between now and April it will toss another small satellite, probably equipped with different instruments, into its round-the-world orbit...