Word: orbiter
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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...
...antennas spinning, lights blinking. Spotlights glared as it landed, picked out a sequin-spangled man and woman dangling from it. The couple waved, the crowd applauded, and a troupe of animal trainers, tumblers, clowns and acrobats raced into the arena to applaud back. As the Sputnik beeped back into orbit among the rafters, the famed Moscow circus cut loose with its spectacular show for the first time in the Western Hemisphere...
Vanguard's second virtue is the solar battery that has kept its small radio beeping steadily, long after bigger satellites lost their voices. Tracked by its radio signals, the "grapefruit's" motions in its orbit have given invaluable information about the earth's slightly bumpy gravitational field, and about the shape of the earth itself. Last week another bit of information came down from the little satellite. There was a slight, unexplained wandering in its long-studied orbit. After much calculation, Dr. Peter Munsen and other orbit experts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration reached their...