Word: orbiter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With a huge gush of smoke and flame, the three-stage Thor-Able rocket last week roared from its Cape Canaveral launching pad, soon to swirl its 270-lb. package into orbit around the earth. To the scientific skeptics who claim that satellites are little more than spectacular stunts, that package provided a spectacularly practical answer: looking down from hundreds of miles in space, it could take and transmit pictures of the earth and its cloud-splotched atmosphere. At the very least...
...weather satellite Tiros I (from Television and Infra-Red Observation Satellite) went into an almost perfectly circular orbit that will keep its cameras at an efficient picture-taking distance. Its farthermost point of 468 miles from the earth is only 32 miles higher than the low point. The feat of orbital precision, unequaled by either U.S. or Soviet satellites, was accomplished by a special Bell Telephone Laboratories guidance system in the rocket's second stage...
Almost as soon as Tiros was safely in orbit, two small weights swung out from its rim and slowed its spin from 136 to 12 revolutions per minute. This strikingly simple trick, like a whirling skater slowing his spin by raising his arms, made photography possible. Two beacon radios called out the satellite's position, reported its inside temperatures and the condition of the apparatus on board. Solar cells topped off the batteries. Nine small instruments observed the bearing of the sun, and another reported the position of the earth's horizon...
...axis pointed in a single direction as it circles the earth. This means that its cameras will point away from the earth much of the time. The ground operator, before he sends his signal, must calculate when the cameras will be looking at something interesting. The satellite's orbit shifts slowly around the earth, allowing all parts that do not lie farther north than France to be photographed. On the second day of its orbiting, it sent to Fort Monmouth cloud-pattern pictures of the Mediterranean region...
...Tiros I spun skyward last week, a stocky, dark-thatched man sat in NASA's Washington headquarters, scanning electronic returns and helping nurse the new space baby into orbit. He was Abe Silverstein, NASA's director of space flight programs, and a living answer to the notion that able scientists do not enjoy working for government. Silverstein has been employed by the U.S. government for 30 of his 51 years, and he still likes his job well enough to stay at it for ten or eleven hours a day and for six days a week during peak periods...