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...Explorer VI windmilled into orbit just 18 months after the U.S. had orbited Explorer I, its first space satellite, in belated reply to the Soviets' Sputnik challenge. The difference between the two marked the steady acceleration of the U.S. space program. Explorer I, still riding in space, is a 30.8-lb. cylinder that reaches an apogee of 1,600 miles. Explorer VI, weighing 142 Ibs., is more complex and reaches higher than anything ever orbited around the earth-26,400 miles, with ellipses to a low perigee of 157 miles. Its aluminum skin encases scores of miniaturized scientific instruments...
Equally important is the data that Explorer VI will send back about its own solar-powered performance. If it continues to be successful, solar energy will be used to drive future U.S. satellite instruments and to operate orbiting TV scanners that will transmit unclouded images of the solar system. Last week, with a wink at Christopher Columbus and George Eastman, Explorer VI televised back a crude image of smudges and blurs-the first picture of the earth ever shot from so far out in space...
This week U.S. spacemen were, soberly predicting that, with winged Explorer VI opening the door to the second generation of satellites, a shoot at Mars and Venus cannot be too far away...
...Explorer VI, shot into orbit from Cape Canaveral last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), was the most sophisticated satellite the U.S. has launched. Rigid arms like paddle wheels, whirling through the sunlight of empty space, were its most spectacular feature, designed to test the possibility of capturing enough energy from the sun to send messages across millions of miles (TIME, April 27). Such a durable source of energy is crucial to proposed space probes to Venus or farther planets, for there is little point in sending out space probes unless their transmitters can send information back to earth...
Other Tasks. But Explorer VI had more to do than absorb energy from the sun. Purposely programed for the most eccentric orbit ever achieved by an earth satellite, it settled almost exactly into its planned path, first reached its record apogee some 26,400 miles straight out into space from the Cape of Good Hope, its perigee a narrow 157 miles over Singapore. With so great a range of altitude, it will pierce both of the newly discovered Van Allen radiation belts (TIME. May 12, 1958 et seq.), collect comprehensive data on phenomena ranging from the earth's ionosphere...