Word: syncom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Getting the communication satellite Syncom II smoothly into its 22,500-mile, 24-hour orbit (TIME, Aug. 2) was only the beginning of the job. There was still a series of delicate maneuvers to be performed before the spacecraft could do its appointed work. Accurate guidance was needed to match Syncom's orbit to the earth's rotation; it was moving a little too fast, drifting ahead of the earth by about 7.5 degrees of longitude per day. Out on the Navy control ship Kingsport in Lagos harbor, Nigeria, engineers sent radio signals that fired jets of hydrogen...
Next job was to spin the satellite so that its radio antenna would point at the earth. Other peroxide jets were fired and the antenna swung toward its target. The movement also increased the satellite's westward drift, and at midweek Syncom II was over Africa, oscillating back and forth across the equator in a lazy figure eight...
...station, but during a northward swing it came just near enough for receivers in New Jersey to catch a radio glimpse of it just above the horizon. The scientists listened intently, and were rewarded for a few minutes by voices that had climbed up to Syncom II from Kingsport and had been relayed down to New Jersey. The messages stopped when Syncom II swung south again and sank below the horizon...
...Syncom I, which was launched last February, went into near-perfect orbit, but its electronics system broke down, leaving it useless as a relay station. Last week's successor, Syncom II, did better. As the satellite climbed toward orbit more than two hours after launch, the Navy communications ship Kingsport, anchored at Lagos, Nigeria, called it by microwave radio. Syncom II answered smartly, proving that its electronics gear was healthy. The satellite even bounced a recording of The Star-Spangled Banner back to the Kingsport...
Jockey for Position. Syncom II developed some drift after it went into orbit, as was expected, but in the wrong direction. The Kingsport next ordered Syncom to fire its hydrogen peroxide rocket to correct the slow eastward drift, and actually days will pass before Syncom's delicate guidance apparatus will jockey it into an exactly synchronous orbit. Then it is supposed to swing gently in a north-south figure-eight pattern, crossing the equator over the Atlantic Ocean while radiomen below test how well it can relay messages between distant points on the distant earth...