Word: telstar
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...call in Washington. The first picture to be beamed from the earth station in Maine was a TV camera's view of the American flag waving near the ground tracking facilities, while a sound track carried The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful. Scientists had expected Telstar to transmit only in the U.S., but they got a bonus. British televiewers, still up at 1 a.m., caught only a wavering picture of the Vice President before the view was lost, but in France the reception was so loud and clear that technicians at Pleumeur-Bodou compared it favorably with...
...rocket itself was a familiar bird; duplicates had blasted into space many times before. But the payload that the reliable Delta tossed into orbit last week was an astonishing piece of equipment. Built by private industry, fired aloft by the U.S. Government, the Bell Telephone Laboratories' little Telstar satellite (3-ft. diameter) opened a bright new era of long-distance communication. Very-high-frequency radio and TV stations, which are limited to line-of-sight range, suddenly saw their future reach out beyond the horizon, around the curve of the earth...
From the Sky. Although it was only 15 hours in orbit before it relayed a phone call between A. T. & T. Board Chairman Frederick R. Kappel in Maine and Vice President Lyndon Johnson in Washington, and although it has already bounced TV programs between the U.S. and Europe, Telstar is only an experimental communications satellite. A large part of its equipment is devoted to studying radiation, micrometeorites, and other potentially troublesome features of space. It was placed deliberately on an elliptical orbit (apogee 3,502 miles, perigee 593 miles) so that it could report from many different altitudes...
...sphere glitters with electricity-generating solar cells. Suspended by nylon cords inside, a 20-in. aluminum canister is crammed with gadgetry. Pink plastic foam nestles around batteries, switches, sensing instruments, 1,064 transistors and 1,464 diodes. But for all the jobs that it can do, Telstar's most spectacular achievement is its radio and TV relay system. A receiver inside the canister amplifies signals received from earth 10 billion times, changes them in frequency from 6,390 to 4,170 megacycles, and sends them back through a transmitter that puts out 2¼ watts...
...make such low power practical, Telstar's puny little transmitter has a hefty ally on the ground. In the mountain-ringed village of Andover, Me., inside a 210-ft. sphere of inflated silvery fabric, stands a great, hornlike antenna. This mammoth electronic ear rotates, twists at odd angles, and can point toward any part of the sky. However it turns, two fair-size houses filled with electronics turn with it, and the thin, frail voice of Telstar is plucked from the sky. Fed into a maser cooled with liquid helium and sent through other intricate equipment, that voice...