Tag Archives: science fact

Science / Space Race

[June 30, 1960] On a roll! (Space Race Wrap-up)

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Something very exciting happened this week: Spaceflight became routine.

Remember just a couple of years ago?  The press was full of flopniks, grapefruit-sized spacecraft, and about a launch every other month.  Every mission was an adventure, and space was the great unknown.

All that has changed.  Not only are we launching more, and more advanced scientific satellites, but we are launching satellite systems.  Only two months ago, the Navy launched the first of the Transit satellites.  These satellites allow a ground-based observer to determine one's location to a fair degree of accuracy.  But since there's no guarantee any one satellite will be overhead at a given time, you need a constellation of Transits.

Number two was launched last week on June 22.  The age of reliable space utilization has dawned.

The news gets even more exciting: The launch of Transit also marked the first piggyback mission.  A little scientific probe called Solrad hitched a ride along with the navigation satellite.  How's that for efficiency?

Solrad is actually quite a neat little device.  For a while, scientists have been trying to study the Sun in the X-Ray spectrum, but the devices carried by Explorer 7 and Vanguard 3 were swamped by the charged particles swirling around the Earth in the so-called Van Allen Belts; thus no useful data was obtained. 

Navy scientists solved this problem in two ways.  First, they put the probe in a lower orbit, avoiding the worst of the Belt radiation.  Second, they employed the simple expedient of placing a large magnet on the front of the detector.  This swept out the unwanted electrons leaving the satellite's sensors clear for observing the Sun.

Solrad doesn't take pictures, mind you.  It just measures the raw value of solar X-ray flux.  But already, the probe has contributed significantly to science–in a rather unexpected field. 

Long distance communications on Earth are largely conducted via radio.  Sometimes, signals will fade out for no (hitherto) discernible reason.  Solrad has found out why–the level of solar X-ray emissions directly affects the radio-reflective properties of the Earth's ionosphere, that upper atmospheric layer of charged particles that causes radio waves to bounce across the planet rather than simply flying off into space.  Thanks to Solrad, and probes like it, I can imagine a time in the near future when we'll not only have a daily weather report, but also a radio reception report.

Speaking of communications, the Air Force reports that, in about a month, it will be launching a real communications satellite (unlike SCORE which just broadcast a prerecorded message).

It's not all good news on the Space Front, however.  I present to you the Galactic Journey obituaries for the month of June:

The Air Force has lost yet another Discoverer satellite: Discoverer 12 never made it to orbit; its booster suffered a second stage failure and crashed into the Atlantic.  Better luck next time.

Transit 1 went offline the day before Transit 2 launched.  I don't know if that was intentional or coincidental.

TIROS 1, the world's first weather satellite, threw in the towel on June 18, 1960.  It is my understanding that the probe did not perform as reliably as had been hoped, but we should see a TIROS 2 in the near future.

Pioneer 5, the first deep space probe, appears to have passed beyond the range of radio reception.  My sources inform me that the last telemetry was received on June 27.  STL engineers will continue to try to resume contact, however.

Services will be held next Sunday at 12:00 PM.  In attendance will be the currently functioning satellites: Vanguard 1, Explorer 7, Transit 2, and Solrad 1. 

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Science / Space Race

[June 4, 1960] The Solar Frontier (Pluto: 9th "planet"?)

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Pluto is big news right now; no wonder since this year is the 30th anniversary of its discovery.  But what do we really know about this enigmatic ninth "planet?" (quotes used advisedly, more on this later.)

Not much.  We know that it is an average of forty Astronomical Units from the Sun; that is to say it orbits forty times farther from the Sun than does the Earth.  At this distance, its surface temperature must be a balmy -380 degrees Fahrenheit, cold enough to freeze almost all gasses.  We know that it reflects the sun's light ,displaying the feeble brightness of a 14th magnitude star–about 1600 times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye.  We have some guesses about its mass… which is how the body was found in the first place.  That remarkable story is worth review.

After the discovery of the 8th planet Neptune by measuring the wiggle it caused gravitationally on 7th planet Uranus' orbit, there was the fervent hope that finding further, unexplained wiggles in those outer planets' orbits would betray a 9th planet.  Famed astronomer and Mars enthusiast, Percival Lowell, spent the last years of his life trying to find it.  As it turns out, he did spot Pluto and even snapped pictures of it, but he took it for a star at the time, so slow is the planet's movement at the far end of the Solar System (similarly heartbreaking stories abound regarding early sightings of Uranus and Neptune.) In fact, the existence of Pluto was not confirmed until Clyde Tombaugh definitively found it, right around my 11th birthday, on February 18, 1930.

But is Pluto the planet Lowell was looking for?  "Planet X?"  There were doubts as soon as Tombaugh made his announcement.  For instance, per Lowell's calculations, for Pluto to have the effect it did on the orbits of the outer planets, it would have to have a mass seven times that of Earth (if, indeed, the effect is genuine–we haven't even mapped Neptune through a complete orbit yet, so the non-Neptune-caused Uranus wiggle is our only source of data).  Yet Pluto is so tiny, optically, that for it to have a mass that high, it would need to be a fragment of a dead, collapsed star.  In fact, early on, that's just what was opined by some–that Pluto was a piece of an old White Dwarf.

Well, soberer heads did the math and determined that, based on its size (computed from its brightness at its distance) and its confirmed effect on Uranus, Pluto couldn't have a mass of more than that of the Earth, and probably somewhere between .5 and 1 Earth masses, depending on who you ask. 

So, Pluto is not Planet X, which may still be floating out there.  One astronomer suggests that there is a big planet nearly twice as far from the Sun as Pluto perturbing Neptune's orbit.

Then the next question is: Is Pluto even a planet at all?  This is probably a good question to settle before everyone gets so comfortable with the idea that there are nine planets in the Solar System that they become stubbornly resistant to any change in that perception.

As early as 1936, a Raymond Littleton proposed that because of Pluto's unexpected tiny-ness and its strange orbit (it is tilted nearly 17 degrees to the plane in which all the other planets orbit, and the orbit is much less circular than that of the other planets–almost halfway to a comet's orbit), it is actually probably some rogue moon of Neptune that somehow got separated from the giant planet, perhaps via some primordial impact when the Solar System was formed.  Further evidence in favor of this hypothesis is the fact that Neptune's moon, Triton, orbits backwards, and at a weird angle.  Gerard Kuiper recently endorsed this origin story for Pluto.

My views tend to be more "Uniformitarian" than "Catastrophic," so I hold to the hypothesis of Dr. Frederick Leonard of UCLA.  In August 1930, just six months after Pluto's discovery, he suggested that Pluto might not be unique: "Is it not likely that in Pluto there has come to light the first of a series of ultra-Neptunian bodies, the remaining members of which still await discovery but which are destined to still be detected?"  Compare this to Ceres, the body discovered in 1801–it was once thought to be a planet, but it turned out to be the first of a new class of worlds, the asteroids. 

Is there a slew of Pluto-like objects in the outer solar system?  Only time, and more observation, will tell.

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Fashion, music, politics, sports, Science / Space Race

[May 27, 1960] Stalled Flights (Midas 2, Pioneer 5, Ozma, and Eichmann)

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There was another mystery Atlas Agena launch from Cape Canaveral on May 24.  My sources tell me it was in the same series as the mission late February that broke up before it could reach orbit.  It appears to be some kind of infrared missile launch detection system.  I even got my hands on some conceptual art, though there's no way of knowing how accurate it is.  Its project name appears to be MIDAS–I'm guessing this stands for "Missile Infrared Detection Alarm System" or something like that.

I don't know if the system works or if the satellite performed properly, but I understand "MIDAS 2" did make it into orbit.  With tensions between American and the U.S.S.R. at an all-time high, thanks to the whole spy plane kerfuffle and the break-down of summit peace talks, we need probes like this more than ever.

In civilian space news, a bit of a setback.  Pioneer 5 switched on its big 150 watt transmitter a few weeks ago so that it could be heard from any point in its orbit around the sun, perhaps more than 100 million miles from Earth.  Unfortunately, the 150 watt transmitter is now off-line due to battery deterioration, and Pioneer has gone back to using its little 5 watt transmitter.  This means its voice will soon be too faint to pick up from the smaller Hawaii dish, and the Big Ear at Jodrell Bank in England will only be able to track the probe to a range of about 25 million miles.  Of course, that's still quite a feat. 

Speaking of Jodrell Bank, remember Dr. Frank Drake's Project Ozma, the program designed to listen for messages from the stars?  Would you believe that positive results were found within the first week of operation? 

It seems that no sooner did the investigating astronomers turn their antenna to the nearby star, Epsilon Eridani, they received an intense signal.  They listened for a few breathless minutes and then turned the antenna away to confirm that the star was indeed the source.  The signal faded as the antenna moved from the star.  Excitedly, they pointed the antenna at Epsilon Eridani again and waited. 

And waited.  Nothing happened.  Was it just a spurious signal?  Had the aliens gone off the air?

Dr. Drake and his team gave Epsilon Eridani and the frequency on which they had received the signal extra attention for the next week, but to no avail.  Then it came back, but not just from the star–from somewhere close by.  The astronomers confirmed this by poking a little antenna out of their observatory window, not focused anywhere in particular.  They picked up the signal there, too.  So, it was probably just a high-flying airplane that they'd picked up.  So much for easy pickings.

On a more personal note, Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi right-hand man for Himmler, in charge of "solving" the Jewish Question, has been apprehended by the Israeli secret service and will stand trial.  He disappeared from Germany as the Third Reich fell, and has presumably been living it up in some Latin American refuge.  I look forward to justice being served.

Finally, a happy birthday to that skinny, outspoken fan and writer, Harlan Ellison.  He is 26 today!

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Magazine

[May 23, 1960] Month's End (June 1960 Fantasy and Science Fiction)

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With Astounding so good this month, I suppose it was too much to ask that Fantasy and Science Fiction would also be of high caliber.  While it's not a bad issue, it's not one of the better ones, either.

Charles Henneberg (who I understand is actually a Parisian named Nathalie) has the best story of the bunch, The Non-Humans, translated by Damon Knight.  This is the second story the team has published in F&SF, and it is far better than the previous one.  It's a lovely historical tale of an Italian renaissance painter and the androgynous alien with whom he falls in love.  An historical personage has a supporting part; his identity is kept secret until the end, though the half-clever can deduce it before finishing.

Britisher H.F. Ellis offers up Fireside Chat, a reprint from Punch.  It involves a haunted house and leaves the reader wondering just who are the ghosts, and who are the current residents?

I know many of my readers are Howard Fast fans, but his latest, Cato the Martian is not among his best.  For the past fifty years, the Martians have listened to our radio broadcasts and watched our television programming with avid interest and increasing concern.  A certain Martian lawmaker, nicknamed after the famous anti-Carthaginian Roman, concludes each speech with "Earth must be destroyed!" until, finally, he gets his comrades in litigation to agree.  The ensuing war does not turn out well for the dwellers of the Red Planet. 

It's not really science fiction.  If anything, it's perhaps the other side of the coin to Earthmen Bearing Gifts, in which the Martians eagerly await the arrival of their Terran neighbors, but with a similar ending.

The Swamp Road, by Will Worthington, is an interesting After-the-Bomb piece about a community held together by a bitterly strict Christian doctrine a la Salem, Massachusetts.  Every so often, one of the citizens changes, developing a second eyelid and otherwise adapting to a dessicated, alien world.  When the change happens to the storyteller and his love, they are forced out of the village and must learn the true nature of their metamorphosis.  It's a good, atmospheric yarn, though I feel it could have been longer.  Some subjects deserve more than just a taste.

Some, on the other hand, don't deserve the space.  Slammy and the Bonneygott is the story of an alien child who crosses dimensions in a tinker toy spaceship and plays with a few children for an afternoon.  It was apparently written by a neophyte named "Mrs. Agate," and the plot was provided by her six-year old son.  One can tell.

Avram Davidson has two settings: amazing and passable.  The Sixth Season is a passable story about a small crew of humans stuck on an anthropological expedition to a backwoods alien-inhabited world for 200 days.  They endure five miserable seasons–can they survive the sixth?

It reminds me of my days growing up in the desert community of El Centro.  I used to lament that we had four seasons like everyone else, but they were Hot, Stink, Bug, and Wind.  That's not being entirely charitable, of course.  We had a balmy Winter, too.  For about two weeks.

Asimov's column this month is Bug-eyed Vonster.  No, it has nothing to do with aliens; it's how the good Doctor remembers the term BeV.  It is an abbreviation for "Billion electron Volts," a unit of electric energy commonly encountered when discussing cosmic rays and atom smashers.  I learned what Cerenkov radiation is (the radiation given by particles going faster than the speed of light in a given material).

Cliff Simak's The Golden Bugs takes up most of the rest of the book.  This time, he trades the poetic farmlands for the prosaic suburbs for the story's setting.  A swarm of extraterrestrial crystal turtle-beetles ride into town on an agate meteorite and begin to wreak havoc on an average American family.  It's fun while it lasts, but it ends too abruptly, and there isn't much to it.  It's the sort of thing one cranks out between masterpieces.

Finally, there is the nigh impenetrable Beyond Ganga Mata by John Berry, a space-filler originally published in The Southwestern.  A fellow travels to India, meets a holy man, journeys for a year, and meets him again.  Perhaps it was simply the lateness of the hour, but had the story not been blessedly short, I'd have had trouble finishing the magazine.

For those who like to keep score, this issue of F&SF was, depending on how you average things, earned between 2.78 and 2.88 stars.  Compare that to Galaxy, which got between 3 and 3.13 stars, and Astounding, which earned exactly three stars even.

Though it could be argued on the numbers that Galaxy was thus the better magazine, and it was certainly the biggest, I'm going to give the June 1960 crown to Astounding.  All of the fiction was decent to very good, and it's not Janifer, Anvil, and Berryman's fault that Campbell wrote a stinker of a "science" article.  Plus, Charley de Milo was the choice story for the month.

Continuing my analysis, this means that the Big Three magazines (counting Galaxy and IF as one) each took the monthly crown twice–all of them tied.  And that's why I keep my subscriptions to all of them.

A more depressing statistic: there was only one woman author this month, and she wrote under a male pseudonym!

By the way, remember Sputnik 4?  The precursor to Soviet manned space travel?  Well, it looks like the Communists won't be orbiting a real person any time soon.  In an uncharacteristically candid news announcement, the Soviets disclosed that the ship's retrorocket, designed to brake the capsule for landing, actually catapulted the craft into a higher orbit.  It'll be up there for a while.  Oh well.

See you soon with a book review!

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Science / Space Race

[May 15, 1960] Soviets take the Lead! (Sputnik 4)

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At long last, the Soviets have launched another Sputnik.

While Americans try to pierce the sky with almost fortnightly frequency (more on that shortly), the Russians seem content to proceed at a more leisurely pace, but to get more bang for their buck.  Their latest shot, which the press has dubbed Sputnik 4, but should really be called "Pre-Manned #1," is something of a revolution.

We don't know too much about the craft yet: only that it weighs an unprecedented 4 and a half tons, and that, like the Air Force's Discoverer series, it has a reentry capsule.  But whereas Discoverer's putative biological sample return mission is likely a cover for a film capsule recovery surveillance system, Sputnik 4 is actually carrying a mannequin astronaut.  Moreover, the craft is far too big for plain surveillance (I imagine, but perhaps the Soviets are not as good at miniaturization as we are; they don't really have to be given how much more powerful their rockets are).

It's definitely another milestone for the East in the Space Race.  Now let's see if they get their dummy spaceman back…

Sadly, the American space program had a setback day-before-yesterday when a Delta rocket, the evolution of the workhorse Thor Able, failed to make it to orbit when its second-stage attitude thrusters didn't fire.  At its tip was America's next foray into satellite communications, Echo 1.  It's just a big metal balloon, but it would have allowed all sorts of message bouncing experiments.  Now it's a rusting hunk at the bottom of the Atlantic.  That'll teach NASA not to launch on Friday the 13th!  Next launch is scheduled for the Summer.


Happier times for the Superpower chiefs

Meanwhile, the four-party (U.S., U.K., France, U.S.S.R.) Peace Summit begins tomorrow in Paris, despite the turbulence caused by the shooting down of an American spy plane over Russia on May 1.  Nikita's threatened to torpedo the whole thing many times, but perhaps the gorgeous Spring weather of the French capital will calm him down.  Planned topics include the settling of the Berlin question and weapons disarmament–the same topics that have been on the table since 1948.

In Democratic Primary news, it looks like Humphrey is out, which essentially seals the nomination for Jack Kennedy, unless Johnson can arrange some sort of upset at the convention.  The clincher came with a disappointing defeat for the Minnesota senator in West Virginia, after which, Humphrey announced the withdrawal of his candidacy for President.  Despite Humphrey's populist charm, Jack Kennedy simply had the better ground game and a more presidential demeanor.  I also understand Kennedy is pushing for a minimum wage hike to $1.25 per hour (it's at $1.00 right now).  Good timing.

Finally, on a more personal note, I'm extending an invitation to jump on the bandwagon.  As you know, I review only the most current literary and film science fiction and fantasy material.  I started this column not just to make me rich and famous, but to discuss the material with fellow fans.  I distribute copies where I can, but that's not always possible.  To that end, I'll be letting you all know ahead of time what I plan to be reading the next month so you can read along with me.  You can also keep up on current publications by perusing the announcement tables. 

This month, the only new novel coming out is Judy Merril's The Tomorrow People.  There are some anthologies also coming out, but, I don't tend to review anthologies since I generally catch the stories in their first run.  I do occasionally cover reprints, as I did with Anderson's Brain Wave.  Of course, I will be covering the June 1960 magazines for this month (I've already reviewed Galaxy and some of Amazing).

See you in two!

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Science / Space Race

[May 9, 1960] Long distance call (Pioneer 5 update)

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Photo found here
Hold onto your ears, folks, because the Pioneer 5 interplanetary satellite just turned on the big transmitter.

Well, it's actually only 150 Watts—only a little more powerful than your average light bulb.  But it's like shouting compared to the 5 Watt radio it was using until now.

Pioneer is now more than 8 million miles away—32 times as far away as the Moon.  It is slowly drifting in toward the Sun on a course that almost parallels that of the Earth.  The plan had been for the spacecraft to intercept the orbit of Venus, but it looks like its initial velocity wasn't high enough. 

This is not so big a deal, since Venus wasn't going to be anywhere near the probe at any point, anyway.  What is a big deal are the reams of useful data still streaming in loud and clear from the nearly two-month old spaceship.

When all is said and done, Pioneer 5 is going to revolutionize our understanding of the solar system.  We are taught that space is a vacuum, and that a vacuum has nothing in it.  In fact, there are all kinds of particles and magnetic fields, all of them interacting in exciting and interesting ways.  And we had no way of understanding how these phenomena worked until we sent a probe out into interplanetary space, beyond the influence of the Earth.

For instance, Pioneer acts as a sort of picket, letting us know just how much of the flux of energetic particles on Earth comes from the Sun .  Working together with Explorer VII, which is in Earth orbit, and balloons, which float high in the lower atmosphere, we can get an excellent view of radiation all the way from space to the ground.  It turns out that the sun is constantly bathing the Earth in high energy electrons—not just during solar flares, as had been hypothesized.  It also appears that the level of cosmic radiation from the sun often reaches levels which are hazardous to life forms.

One experiment that never seems to work out is the micrometeoroid detector.  You'd think something so simple, really just a big microphone attached to an electric circuit, would be hard to mess up.  Yet I can't recall a single STL-built detector that has performed adequately.  Pioneer's has given squirrelly numbers that clearly indicate a sick experiment. 

On the other hand, the probe is still working, so whatever dust bullets are out there can't be too dangerous.

Meanwhile, Pioneer's magnetometer, the most sensitive yet launched, has confirmed the wobbly interface between the Earth and the Sun's magnetic fields is a good 55,000 or so miles out—twice as far as originally expected.  The turbulence in the region also doesn't match theory. 

This is why empiricism beats philosophy: you can come up with all the pretty models you like, but you have to test things to find out how the universe actually works!

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In other news, it looks like that story about the NASA "weather study" U2 was a pack of lies.  It was, as Khruschev exclaimed with a shark-toothed grin, actually a spy plane caught in the act of spying.  And he has the pilot in custody.

I understand why we have spy planes.  I understand why we had to lie about the spy plane.  I know that the upcoming summit probably wasn't going to bear much fruit anyway.  It's still frustrating.

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On a pleasanter note, a very happy 40th birthday to William Tenn, the quite excellent British import. 

See you soon with more print and film updates!  I've got a lot of material to cover…

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Science / Space Race

[April 25, 1960] Long distance fix (The Repair of Pioneer 5)

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Imagine doing brain surgery by remote control.

That's just what STL engineer, Robert E. Gottfried, did over the weekend, on an ailing deep space probe.

Pioneer 5 blasted off on March 11, and it recently passed the 5 million mile distance mark on its way to the orbit of Venus.  For more than a month, the doughty probe returned an excellent stream of data thanks to its digital brain, Telebit.  This little computer allows the spacecraft to store experimental results and beam them back to Earth at regular intervals.  Thus, observers on the ground get continuous readings of the magnetic, radioactive, and micrometeoroid properties of interplanetary space.

But then some of the data Pioneer was sending back became… strange.  For instance, the spacecraft reported that its battery voltage was too low to send signals—as it was sending signals! 

How do you fix something that's twenty times as far away as the Moon?  First, you figure out what the problem is.  Luckily, Pioneer's builders (Space Technology Laboratories in Los Angeles) had the foresight to make a back-up copy of the Telebit hardware.  Gottfried poked and prodded the thing until it started giving him results that matched the ones received from Pioneer's system.  Through painstaking tracing, the culprit was found—a single faulty or damaged diode, a pinhead-sized component, one of 1500. 

The result was that there was a consistency to the flawed data that could be compensated for.  Once Gottfried knew what the problem was, he could create a program that would take data from the bad Telebit and translate it into good data.  The digital patch worked.  While we can't fix Pioneer 5, we can now translate its gibberish into useful science.  For his efforts, NASA's chief administrator, Keith Glennan, dubbed Gottfried "The Long-Armed Repairman" in a congratulatory telegram.

For the curious, Pioneer 5's cooling systems maintain its internal temperature at a balmy 50 degrees.  Not bad for being in the vastness space!  The probe is still using its lower power 5-watt transmitter, and is still being received clearly at the giant Jodrell Bank radio telescope in England.  However, the smaller "dish" in Hawaii is already having difficulty picking up the spacecraft, so it is likely that Pioneer will start using its bigger 150-watt transmitter next week.  NASA believes we will be able to communicate with the probe as far out as 50 million miles!

To give you an idea of how amazing this is, think about the stations you pick up on your AM radio.  They broadcast at around 50 thousand watts, and you can only hear them if they are relatively close (one can pick up some fairly distant stations at night, but none are more than a thousand miles or so away.)

Of course, your antenna is probably a telescoping rod or a long wire.  The dish at Jodrell Bank is 250 feet across!  Nevertheless, that it can pick up such an unprecedentedly distant and weak signal is almost miraculous.  I say "almost" because it was not luck that made it happen but good engineering and pioneering digital technology.

Quite a remarkable feat, and worthy, I think, of an article. 

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Science / Space Race

[April 19, 1960] Where we are (Space News Round-up)

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Remember the years before Sputnik when space news comprised semi-annual rocket launch reports, annual Willy Ley books, and the occasional Bonestell/Von Braun coffee table book?

Even after Sputnik, weeks would go by without a noteworthy event.  But, slowly but surely, the pace of space launches has increased.  Just this last week, I caught wind of four exciting pieces of news.  I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when I have to pick and choose from a myriad of stories rather than reporting on every mission.

So what happened this week?  First off, on April 13, 1960, the Navy launched, on an Air Force Thor Able-Star rocket, Transit 1B (somehow, I missed the failed launch of its earlier brother, Transit 1A, last September).  It is a brand new kind of satellite, using the simplest of concepts. 

Have you ever noticed how a train's whistle rises in pitch as the locomotive approaches, and then the pitch lowers as the train moves away?  This is because the sound waves from the whistle are compressed by the train's motion as it nears; conversely, the waves stretch out as the train departs.  The wavelength determines the whistle's pitch, so a moving train's whistle will never play entirely true—unless you happen to be riding the train and, thus, going the same velocity.

Now, if one knows the true pitch of the whistle, one can mathematically figure out how fast the train is going with respect to the listener just by comparing the true pitch to the heard pitch.  Imagine a satellite equipped with a whistle (a radio transmitter, actually; sound doesn't travel through the vacuum of space).  Since the satellite is always moving with respect to the ground observer, if that observer knows the true wavelength of the satellite's signal, then s/he can figure out how fast the satellite is going from the wavelength of the observed signal.  Knowing the orbital path of the satellite, it is then easy to determine exactly where one must be at any given time to hear the satellite's signal at the received pitch.

In other words, using just a satellite, a transmitter, a receiver, and a computerized calculator, one can determine one's position to within one-half of a kilometer.  Now, this isn't good enough to help you navigate your car to work or a weekend party, but it is quite sufficient to help ships find their way at sea.  In particular, America's submarines will use Transit for high-accuracy navigation.  But someday, I can imagine Transit's descendants providing pinpoint accuracy to civilians.  Imagine a suitcase sized machine that could tell you where you are to the resolution of just a few meters!  Yet another way satellites are returning on their investment.  Soon, we'll wonder how we ever did without them.

It may be a while before we say that about the Air Force's Discoverer program.  Designed (ostensibly) to carry biological samples to and from orbit, the series has not yet been successful.  Sometimes the rocket malfunctions.  Sometimes the capsule gets lots on reentry.  And sometimes, the capsule stays forever in space.  That's what happened this time, to Discoverer 11.  The rocket launch on April 15 was successful, but it looks like the reentry capsule suffered separation anxiety after detaching from its mothership.  Both are still in orbit, and it looks like they will remain there, close to each other, until friction with the atmosphere causes them to become artificial meteors.

Speaking of spy satellites (ahem), the first weather satellite, continues to send beautiful pictures of Earth's weather.  Interestingly, NASA goes out of its way to deny that TIROS is being used for espionage (whereas the Air Force has been conspicuously quiet regarding Discoverer's true role).  I believe NASA—TIROS' cameras aren't nearly good enough to return surveillance data, though there is no doubt the military could benefit from accurate weather reports.

Finally, Pioneer 5, the world's first deep space probe, has passed the 5 million mile mark (20 times the distance to the Moon) and is still going strong!  So far, the probe has returned 100 hours of usable data on the "space weather" beyond the Earth's influence.  I can't wait to read the papers resulting from their analysis! 

And for the non-eggheads amongst my readers, while the scientific papers may not be of exceptional interest, the inventions they inspire likely will be.

See you soon!

—

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Science / Space Race

[April 2, 1960] Aeolus Chained (TIROS 1)

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"Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."  Mark Twain

That sage 19th century observation may not hold much longer if NASA has anything to say about it.

Last year, Vanguard 2 was touted as the first weather satellite because it had a pair of photocells designed to measure the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth.  This way, scientists could quantify the sun's effects on our climate.  No useful data was obtained, however, since the probe quickly became a whirling dervish.  Explorer 7 has a sophisticated radiometer experiment, which is more successfully accomplishing the same mission.

But it was not until yesterday that humanity had an honest-to-goodness weather shutterbug in orbit snapping pictures of clouds from hundreds of miles above them. 

The spacecraft is called TIROS: Television InfraRed Observation Satellite.  Every 90 minutes, TIROS makes a complete circuit of the Earth, with most of the inhabited surface visible to its twin TV cameras.  TIROS' photos are facsimiled to NASA headquarters (normally—I understand that the very first photos were conveyed via helicopter from the tracking station at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey).  They can then be distributed to scientists, weathermen, reporters, the general public.


TIROS' first picture—compare it to the "photo" returned by Explorer 6!

TIROS is going to usher in a new era of meteorology.  Weathermen will make accurate predictions days in advance.  Hurricane courses will be mapped, saving lives and property.  The President won't be rained out on golfing days. 

Perhaps more importantly, TIROS proves once and for all the practical value of satellites.  This isn't some eggheaded application too esoteric for the public to understand.  Nor is it just jingoistic one-upsmanship.  When someone asks you why we bother sending craft into space, you can point to TIROS' picture, the likes of which will soon replace the crude line drawings we currently find in our newspapers.

On a side note, TIROS marks the first homegrown NASA probe.  All of the previous Pioneers and Explorers were made by outside contractors (like Space Technology Laboratories) or absorbed facilities (like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory).  TIROS was made by NASA's Goddard Space Center in Maryland, which first started operation in June 1959.  I'd say they've earned an "A" right out of the gate!

Speaking of reports, we're at a science fiction convention in Los Angeles this weekend.  I'll try to have a wrap-up soon after the photos are developed.  During the con's down-time, should there be any, I plan to finish Edmond Hamilton's recently released The Haunted Stars while lounging in a chair by the hotel pool.  It's anyone's guess whether the convention or the book will get an article first…

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Science / Space Race

[March 28, 1960] Calling all Stars! (Project Ozma begins)

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Imagine installing telephone service in your home for the first time only to have it ring almost immediately.  This is the hope of scientists working on the colorfully named "Project Ozma" at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.

Simultaneously with humanity's first steps into space, we are developing brand new methods of sensing the stars from the ground.  Radio astronomy is an exciting field that allows us to sweep wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation well beyond the range of the human eye, revealing heretofore unknown features of the universe. 

It also may allows us to eavesdrop on signals emanating from another star.  Project Ozma, named after the fairy princess ruler of L. Frank Baum's magical kingdom, Oz, operates on the assumption that alien races will be as gregarious as humans.  Dr. Frank Drake, Ozma's chief, is hoping that once a species gets the ability to send high power messages across the galaxy, it will (and already has).

Starting next week, Drake and his team will aim their 85 foot wide "ear" to scan nearby Sun-like stars.  Their first two targets are Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, a yellow and orange star (respectively) about the same age as our sun.  If you're wondering why the telescope isn't being directed at Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours, it's because that promising target is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

Now, there's a haystack worth of bandwidth that a needle of a broadcast could hide in.  We can't search all of it at once, so Drake has arbitrarily picked a narrow band of wavelengths—around 21 centimeters in size.  His is not an entirely uneducated guess.  The 21 centimeter band is a sort of cosmic yardstick, home to a background hiss emitted by galactic hydrogen, that any astronomically advanced species will know about.  Moreover, targeting this band allows Drake to do some "real" astronomical research and thus further justify his funding.

What will a message from the stars sound like?  It will have to be some kind of modulated, non-random pattern.  Perhaps a series of pulses spelling out a universal constant in binary?  A simple on-off code?  The possibility I find the most fun is the idea of an alien race picking up our radio broadcasts and beaming them back at us.  That would be the surest sign that our presence in the universe has been acknowledged.

On the other hand, I'm not sure Fibber McGee and Molly are the best ambassadors Earth has to offer…

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