Word: transits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Last week the U.S. launched a 265-lb., candy-striped medicine ball called Transit IB, forerunner of a series of U.S. Navy satellites that by 1962 will provide more exact navigational guidance for ships and planes (see SCIENCE). And even the long-jinxed Air Force Discoverer program got off a perfect launching of Discoverer XI into polar orbit, though airmen once again failed to recover the data capsule that the satellite ejected...
...navigation is World War II's loran (for long-range aid to navigation), a system of cross-monitored radio signals that is highly expensive and covers only the more frequently traveled parts of the earth. Last week loran seemed destined for obsolescence, as an experimental Navy satellite called Transit I-B blasted into space from Florida's Cape Canaveral...
...Transit I-B (an attempt to send Transit I-A into orbit failed last September) is only the first basic step in a process that is expected to take two years to develop. Many of the first press stories excitedly treated it as though it were already an operational system. It is not-however dramatic its promise for the future...
...Doppler Effect. Lofted by an Air Force Thor-Able-Star rocket. Transit I-B slanted around the world from 51° N. to 51° S. and settled into an elliptical orbit (apogee, 475 miles; perigee, 235 miles), sending radio signals from the moment it left the pad. From Texas to Hampshire, England, tracking stations sent information to a computing center near Washington, D.C. In future models, orbit-predicting data will be quickly rebroadcast to the satellite, which will remember its daily itinerary on magnetic tape, constantly announce it from space (the day-to-day orbital variations are minuscule...
...goes by. Similarly, the signals from a satellite increase in frequency as they move nearer to a receiver on earth, diminish as they move on. By measuring the rate of change of these frequencies, a navigator can determine his exact distance from the satellite's path. And since Transit will also announce just where it will be on its path at any given moment, a computer on shipboard will be able to tell the navigator where...