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Science / Space Race

[November 18, 1968] Pioneers and Protons (a space round-up)

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by Gideon Marcus

The Interplanetary Pioneers

When you think "outer space", you don't usually think of weather.  In fact, weather in space is a bit like weather on Earth: there's wind, turbulence, a steady rain, and occasional storms.  Except that the wind and rain are the sun's ceaseless spray of charged particles along with their attendant magnetic fields.  The storms are the result of solar flares, those sudden unsettled periods when fiery prominences reach out from the sun's surface.

These phenomena can even be sensed by humans—as aurorae where the solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetic field, and as the crackle of static on a shortwave radio.  For satellites and space travelers, the solar radiation, particularly during flares, can damage electronics and internal organs.  There are thus a lot of reasons it would be practical to have a space weather report, just as we have a daily weather report down here on Earth.


Northern Lights, 1921, by Sydney Laurence

This is why the Pioneer series of solar weather satellites, the first launched December 16, 1965 and the latest launched on November 8th of this year, was created: to serve as long-term weather sentinels in space, the interplanetary equivalent of our TIROS weather satellites.

Prior to the launch of Pioneer 6 (no relation to Pioneer 5 or its predecessors save for the name), the mapping of the solar wind had been a strictly local affair.  The Interplanetary Monitoring Platform satellites, Explorers 18, 21, 28, 33, 34, and 35, have all been launched in high Earth orbits to survey the solar wind between the Earth and the moon.  This is in service of the Apollo program.

The aforementioned Pioneer 5 and interplanetary probes like Mariner 2 have made preliminary forays into true interplanetary space beyond the Earth/moon region, but those missions only lasted a few months.  The interplanetary Pioneers will be on station for years.

Launched on Delta rockets (the direct descendants of the Thor-Able rockets that launched the first Pioneers toward the moon), Pioneers 6-9 (and eventually #10, next year), were hurled into orbits that parallel our own, but further out in the case of Pioneers 7, 8, and 9; a little closer to the sun in the case of Pioneer 6.  The outer ones orbit a little more slowly while P6 zooms a little faster.  As a result, they all spread out, making a necklace of stations around the sun.

Pioneer 6 was launched in 1965 during the lull in the sun's 11 year cycle called "the solar minimum".  The hope was that we would get continuous data as the sun increased in activity, flaring more and more often.  We have not been disappointed.  On July 7, 1966, a big shock front from a solar flare enveloped Explorer 33.  45 hours later, Pioneer 6 was hit.  Interestingly, because of the time delay, even though both probes were similar distances from the sun (but far apart in orbit, of course), it is believed those might have been the result of two different flares, or perhaps two disturbances from the same one.

When the Pioneers were launched, scientists had a basic idea of that the solar wind looked like the spiral spray of a sprinkler head, this caused by the 28-day rotation of the sun.  But the instruments onboard the sophisticated Pioneers afforded much more detailed analysis of these streams and fields.  The Pioneers have found that the local magnetic fields will suddenly flip every so often.  Their microstructure is like woven filaments, far more complicated than we had previously conceived.


High-level view of the "sprinkler" spray of the solar wind

Pioneers 7 and 8 sailed through the Earth's magnetosheath, that magnetic shadow formed as the sun's wind interacts and deflects around the Earth.  Comparing their results to the closer-in Explorer 33, they found that this shadow tail gets more diffuse, more like the background interplanetary wind at greater distances, which is what one would expect.


The Earth's magnetic field (you can see the figure 8 Van Allen Belts) and the long, trailing, magnetosheath.

The Pioneer satellites are well-placed for more than just solar science.  Pioneers 8 and 9 are equipped with cosmic-ray telescopes designed to measure the chemical composition and sprectra of the galactic wind—the higher-energy rain of particles from beyond our solar system.  But the coolest use of the Pioneers so far (to me) is when Pioneer 7 was used to measure the lunar ionosphere.  On January 20, 1967, the moon "occulted" (blocked) the space probe, as seen from Earth.  Radio waves were beamed from a 150-foot dish run by Stanford past the edge of the moon.  They found that the scattering that resulted can't be explained just by the physical rocks of the lunar surface.  There must be a tenuous "atmosphere" above the moon, at least on the sunlit side, created at high altitudes by interactions between the solar wind and the surface of the moon.

There's actually a lot more, esoteric stuff that's way above my head.  And there will be plenty more as the Pioneers will probably keep going for many more years.  Though they haven't gotten much press, I think these are some of the most exciting missions to date.  Stay tuned!

My, what big…rockets you have!

Three years ago, I made a brief announcement about the launch of a new Soviet probe, one so enormous that its size alone had ramifications for the future of the Communist space program.  Proton, launched July 16, 1965, massed a whopping twelve tons, making it the biggest single object put in orbit until the November 1967 launch of Apollo 4.  That means that the USSR has a Saturn-class rocket in its stable, which is why the concerns about an imminent moon mission have grounding.

Since Proton 1, three more Protons have been sent into orbit, the latest just two days ago on November 16th.  Proton 4 weighs seventeen tons, which will beat all records—at least until Apollo 8 goes up in December. 

Why are they so heavy?  Because they carry heavy instruments.  Protons 1 and 2 included a gamma-ray telescope, a scintillator telescope, and proportional counters.  These counters were able to determine the total energy of each super-high energy cosmic particle individually, a capability no prior satellite had possessed, measuring cosmic rays with energy levels up to 100 million electron volts.

In addition to the above equipment, the fourteen ton Proton 3 was also equipped with a two-ton gas-Cerenkov-scintillator telescope.  Its goal was to attempt to detect the "quark", a brand new theoretical sub-particle that, according to theory, makes up all atomic particles.  Presumably, Proton 4 mounts a similar device with refinements.

Unlike most Soviet satellites, whose missions are shrouded in secrecy, data from the experiements onboard the first two Protons have produced at least five scientific papers on cosmic rays.  I haven't seen anything on Proton 3, but astronauts on Gemini 11 managed to snap a picture of it in September 1966!

Will the advanced experiments on Proton 4 produce a scientific bonanza to rival that of the Pioneers?  Only time will tell.  For now, the papers are more obsessed with the rocket than the satellite.

Apparently, it's all about size.  Who knew?




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Science / Space Race

[August 1, 1964] On Target (The Successful Flight of Ranger 7)

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With the recent American lunar triumph, it is appropriate to take a look back at the long road that winds from Sputnik and ends in Oceanus Procellarum…


by Gideon Marcus

Shooting the Moon

It all began with a dream.

The Moon has captured our imaginations since we were first definably human.  Some two thousand years ago, the Greeks learned that the Moon was our closest celestial companion; it took another 1800 years for Galileo to determine that it was a spherical body, not unlike the Earth. 

It is no surprise that this discovery spawned some of our earliest science fiction stories: Godwins's The Man in the Moone, Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, Wells' recently cinemized The First Men in the Moon. 

With the launch of Sputnik, the heavens were broken open, and science fiction could be made fact.  Indeed, just after the Soviets launched their first satellite, the engineers at Ramo-Wooldrige's (now TRW) Space Technology Laboratories, made plans to build their own Moon rocket out of boosters already in existence, mating the Thor missile they had developed with the Vanguard rocket's second and third stages.  With luck, they would have probe around the Moon less than a year after the inauguration of the Space Age.

It was an ambitious plan.  Too ambitious.  The first of the so-called Pioneers blew up on the launch pad.  The next, Pioneer 1, made it halfway to the Moon before, like Icarus, falling back to Earth.  Pioneer 2 barely limped out of the Earth's atmosphere before burning up.

So ended the first American Moon program.  Enter Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Situated across the San Fernando Valley from its rival, JPL was working with Von Braun's Jupiter rocket, the same one that had launched America's first satellite, Explorer 1.  Unfortunately, JPL's first attempt, Pioneer 3, also faltered on the way. 

And then came the Soviets' turn.

Red Moon

1959 began with a Dream, a Russian Dream.  On January 3, Mechta ("dream") sailed off toward and past the Moon, the first human-made object to become a satellite of the Sun.  The American success of Pioneer 4, two months later, was subsequently eclipsed when the second Mechta impacted the Moon in September, depositing Soviet medals upon Earth's companion — the first interplanetary delivery. 

Capping off this lunar tour de force was the Soviet follow-up, called Luna 3, Lunik 3, and Mechta 3.  Not only did this probe sail around the Moon, but it took pictures.  These missions were not just engineering and prestige shots, they were returning valuable information about the Moon.  It had no magnetic field, for instance.  The never-before seen Far Side was curiously devoid of the "seas" that mottle its Earth-facing surface.

We had to know more.

Local Space Race

With JPL batting .500 with its Pioneers, STL decided it needed to do better than its .000 average (though, to be fair, the flight of Pioneer 1 was a triumph for its time).  Mating the Vanguard stages of its prior Pioneer rocket to the beefy Atlas ICBM, the boys from Redondo Beach were sure they could launch the first bonafide lunar observatory into orbit around the Moon.

It didn't work.  1959-60 saw four failed attempts, all botched because the bleeding-edge Atlas wasn't yet up to the task (and how reassuring that must have been to the Mercury astronauts who had to ride the thing in a couple of years!)

One team's failure is another's opportunity.  While the second STL lunar endeavor was ending in tears, JPL was already hard at work on its own second-generation Moon project: Ranger.

Ranger was actually two programs in one.  This reflected the tension between the engineers, who wanted a craft that could make it the Moon and return information about its surface (of immediate use to a crewed lunar program), and the scientists, who wanted not only to learn about the Moon, but the space between it and the Earth.

The first two Rangers weren't even built to go to the Moon.  Planned to be launched into high orbits on a combination of the Atlas and a powerful second stage called the Vega (this civilian stage later substituted with the military's Agena), Rangers 1 and 2 would measure magnetic fields and the solar wind.

Would, but never did.  Ranger 1 and Ranger 2 both were stranded in useless low orbits due to booster malfunctions (plus ça change).  On the other hand, the satellites themselves were sound, and a modified Block 1 Ranger became the highly successful Venus probe, Mariner 2, in 1962.

Never mind them.  Rangers 3-5 were the real lunar probes, even including giant balsawood pimples on the end, which housed seismometers that could survive impact with the Moon.  It was more important than ever that we know what the lunar surface was like now that President Kennedy had announced that we would, as a nation, put a man on the Moon and bring him safely back to Earth before the decade was out.

Easier said than done.  Ranger 3, launched in January 1962, missed the Moon.  Moreover, it sailed past while facing the wrong way.  The probe took no useful pictures, and a failure of the onboard computer prevented the acquisition of sky science data.

The identical Ranger 4 was both more and less successful.  From a launch and trajectory perspective, it was perfect: On April 26, 1962, Ranger 4 became the first American probe to hit the Moon.  Unfortunately, it was an inert frame of metal by that time; NASA might as well have shot a cannonball.  In fact, the probe never worked, the first Ranger not to function at all in space. 

Still, the mission was heralded (rightfully) as a partial success.  Surely Ranger 5, last in the Block 2 series, would be a win.

No dice.  Ranger 5, launched in October 1962, lost internal power shortly after take-off and sailed silently past the Moon two days later.

Sharper Focus

For those keeping count, the Americans were now 1 for 14 in the Moon Race, a record even worse than that of last year's San Francisco 49ers.  As 1962 drew to a close, JPL undertook an internal audit and came to the following conclusions:

  • JPL's management structure was unsuited to big, complicated projects like Ranger
  • Ranger was too complicated, too dependent on every system working perfectly
  • The general scientific objectives conflicted with the specific, Apollo-supporting objectives

The result was a beefed up management staff that would focus primarily on Ranger until the probe worked.  And a newer, leaner Ranger.

Ranger, Block 3, had one job.  It would crash into the Moon, taking TV pictures all the way down.  No other science experiments.  Up came the hue and cry from scientists, but the decision was made.  As it was, it would take at least another year to develop and launch Ranger 6.  It had to work.

It didn't.

Ranger 6 had a textbook launch on January 30, 1964.  Shortly after the probe reached space, its TV system inexplicably turned itself on and off, but otherwise, all was well.  Indeed, Ranger 6 cruised through its mid-flight course correction burn like a dream, pointed straight and true for the Moon's Sea of Tranquility.  JPL Director William Pickering felt confident enough to declare, "I am cautiously optimistic."

But when it came time for Ranger 6 to do its job, to take TV pictures of the Moon, it stubbornly refused.  The probe impacted the lunar surface without returning a single shot.

Uproar.  Six failures in a row.  There was serious Congressional talk of shutting down the Ranger program altogether.  On the other hand, the mission had been almost entirely successful.  There was every reason to believe (or at least hope) that improved check-out procedures on the next, already built, Ranger 7, would lead to a completely successful mission.  After a NASA investigation and a Congressional inquiry, JPL was given one more chance.

Dream into Reality

Opportunities for lunar missions come once a month, when the Moon is situated such that the least energy is required for a rocket from Earth to reach it.  The latest such apparition started on July 27, the opening of the lunar "window."  Ranger 7's powerful Atlas-Agena rocket, now the most reliable part of the mission infrastructure, stood ready on the launchpad.  The countdown was steady, until, just 51 minutes before the scheduled launch, a faulty telemetry battery had to be replaced.  It was, and the countdown resumed…but the a fatal flaw in a ground guidance component meant that the launch had to be scrubbed. 

But only for a day.  On July 28, the countdown proceeded smoothly, and at 9:50am PDT, Ranger 7 was sent into orbit.  The onboard TV system appeared to be working normally, and half an hour later, the Agena engine fired once more, propelling the spacecraft toward the Moon.

So accurate was this burn that Ranger 7 didn't need a mid-course correction to hit the Moon.  However, the path it was to take would carry it to the lunar Far Side, which would make the transmission of TV pictures impossible.  A day after launch, a short engine burn aimed the probe directly for its destination: The Sea of Clouds.

In the early morning on July 31, 1964, reporters and cameramen once again filed into JPL's von Karman Auditorium for Ranger 7's final descent.  Just six months ago, Ranger 6 had been so disappointing that Walter Downhower, the Chief of the System Design Section who had been the voice over the auditorium speakers that day, refused to ever do that job again.

This time, JPL's George Nichols was the voice of Ranger as it zoomed toward the Moon at 5000 miles per hour.  At 3:07am PDT (yes, I stayed up, too), Nichols was able to announce that Ranger's television system and its six cameras were working properly.  Three minutes later, the first images taken from the vicinity of the Moon began to pour in as a stream of ones and zeroes on a telemetry stream.  Five minutes went by.  Still going.  Ten minutes.  Then, at 6:25 PDT, the hum of Ranger's telemetry abruptly cut off.

But this was a planned cessation — Ranger had hit the Moon!

Where we Stand

In all, some 4,316 pictures were taken of the Moon, all of higher resolution than is possible from Earthbound telescopes.  JPL identified dozens of new craters, never before seen.  One cluster was probably made by rocks thrown into the sky when the giant impact crater, Copernicus, was formed ages ago, two hundred miles away from where Ranger 7 crashed.  More importantly, NASA has gotten its first close-up look of the lunar surface; JPL scientists have identified favorable and treacherous landscapes for the upcoming Apollo missions to land on.

There will be at least two more Block III Ranger flights aimed at other parts of the Moon.  Plans to continue the series through to #14 are in doubt given that the upcoming Lunar Orbiter project (managed by Langley Research Center in Virginia) may already be flying by the time the later Rangers are ready.

And what about the Soviets?  What happened to the madcap competitive days of 1958-9?

As it turns, out, the USSR has had just one lunar probe since then: Luna 4.  Launched during the gloomiest days of Ranger, on April 2, 1963, it was highly touted by Soviet news services.  Three days later, as the craft approached the Moon, TASS and Izvestia reported that a bonanza of science would be forthcoming.

Then…nothing.  The probe sailed past the Moon with hardly any coverage.  A couple of conferences scheduled for the discussion of Luna 4's results were quietly canceled.  Per the British astronomer, Sir Bernard Lovell, the craft actually failed in its mission to enter lunar orbit.

This brings up the interesting possibility that the Soviets have launched other Moon missions and that none of them have been successful enough to be publicly announced.  That would explain some of the Kosmos flights about which the Russians have been so terse in their reporting.  It may well be that the Soviet Union is finding the Moon as tough a target as the Americans were.

The bottom line, then, is this: After five years of diligent effort (presumably by both of the planet's Superpowers), the Americans have emerged the victors in this second stage of the Moon race.

Who will win the third?

[Come join us at Portal 55, Galactic Journey's real-time lounge!  Talk about your favorite SFF, chat with the Traveler and co., relax, sit a spell…]




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Science / Space Race

[Dec. 15, 1960] Booby Prize (Pioneer Atlas Able #4)

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Today, NASA made a record–just not one it wanted to.

For the first time, a space program has been a complete failure.  Sure, we've had explosions and flopniks and rockets that veered too high or too low.  We've had capsules that popped their tops and capsules that got lost in the snow.  But never has there been a clean streak of bad missions.

Pioneer Atlas Able, Space Technology Laboratories' sequel to its marginally successful Pioneer (Thor) Able moon probes and its rather triumphant Explorer 6 and Pioneer 5 missions, was supposed to be the capping achievement.  It was the biggest American probe yet, and it carried an unprecedented myriad of instruments.

The problem wasn't the probe, which probably would have worked given the success of its well-tested predecessors.  No, it was the rocket.  We just didn't have anything purpose-built that would throw in the Soviet weight class.  But there were a few Atlas ICBMs lying around, as well as the generally reliable second and third stages used in the Thor Able.  They were married in the ungainly form of the Atlas Able.

None of them worked.  The first one died in September '59 in a static (non-launch) test.  #2 popped its top two months later when the air pressure in the nosecone was insufficiently vented.  #3 weathered Hurricane Donna only to tip fanny over kettle and plunge into the Atlantic.  And #4…

We're still not sure why #4 burst into flames early this morning at a height of 40,000 feet.  What we do know is that's another $40,000,000 down the drain, and it marks an end to the STL space program, at least for now. 

In fact, it marks a rather dramatic end of an entire chapter of spaceflight.  The next set of moon probes, called Ranger, are being developed by a completely different center (Jet Propulsion Laboratories) and along completely different lines.  It won't be launched by an Able derivative but rather a rocket using one of the new second-stage boosters: the Air Force's Agena, or maybe even the powerful Centaur.

Either way, it's likely that the Soviets will score the next success in the lunar/interplanetary race as a result. 

On the other hand, it's not all bad news.  The Air Force's ill-starred Discoverer program, which suffered far more failures than Atlas Able, has had an unbroken streak of success.  #18 flew on Pearl Harbor Day, and its capsule, containing biological specimens (and probably several rolls of film with snapshots of the Russian countryside from orbit), was recovered in mid-air, as planned.  The government is no longer hiding the surveillance purpose of the program, which I suppose is reassuring, somehow.

The next Mercury test is set to go in four days.  Keep your fingers crossed!

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Science / Space Race

[Sep. 26, 1960] Third time unlucky (Atlas Pioneer failure)

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It's enough to break an engineer's heart: yet another Atlas Able launch has gone awry, sending its Pioneer payload not to the Moon, but into the drink.

It is an anticlimactic ending for a mission that withstood all of nature's attempts to stop it.  Just two weeks ago, one of the most destructive hurricanes in history smashed into Florida, sending the launch crew packing.  They got the booster back up in good time, however.

No, what killed the mission were engineering glitches (a brand-new word for a brand-new problem).  In fact, not once has the Atlas Able, the odd marriage of the Atlas ICBM and the top two stages of the old Vanguard booster, worked out.  The first failure was a static test firing that ended in explosion.  The second disappointment involved a popped nosecone.  This third time, something went wrong in the second stage.  The booster got tipped beyond its ability to compensate, and the thing ended up boring straight into the Atlantic Ocean 14 minutes after launch.  'Dolf Thiel, the Air Force's ex-German rocketeer (counterpart to the Army's Von Braun), says his team still doesn't what caused the crash.  That's $10 million down the drain.

There is only one Atlas Pioneer probe and one Atlas Able booster left in the Air Force stable.  The next flight is planned for the end of this year.  Let's hope the fourth time turns out to be the charm.  It would be nice.  The Atlas Pioneer is an impressive machine– at 140 kg, the biggest American deep space probe yet attempted.  The slew of onboard experiments have already been successfully tested on previous flights (Explorer 6 and Pioneer 5), and the vehicle carries the very first engine that can be started, stopped, and restarted in space.  Interestingly, there is no camera on the Atlas Pioneers; but if you saw the results the last time the Air Force released a photo from space, you can understand why they wouldn't want to use their old camera again.


From here

If you're one of the 158 million Americans (out of 180 million) that owns a TV set, I'm willing to bet I know what you'll be doing tonight: the first ever presidential candidate debates will be televised this evening.  I'm very interested to see how this newest of campaign ideas meshes with the newest of communications media.

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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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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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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

[March 18, 1960] A million miles from Earth! (Pioneer 5 update #1)

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Who calls a press conference at 2:00 in the morning?

And what sort of fool journalist covers a 2 A.M. press conference?

NASA and me, respectively.

Dr. Keith Glennan, NASA's administrator, admitted that it was an unorthodox time to gather scientists and reporters together, but given the unprecedented nature of the event to be discussed, it's quite understandable.  After all, never before in the history of humanity has a message been received from an artificial probe 1,000,000 miles from Earth.

Pioneer 5, the interplanetary mission launched last week, is now four times as far from the Earth as the Moon, and its 5 watt transmitter is still being picked up loud and clear.  In a dramatic flourish, just after the conference started, Dr. Glennan ordered the tracking station in Hawaii to query the spacecraft.  The plucky probe responded in a jiffy (discounting the 5-second delay since radio signals travel at the speed of light) to the delight of the audience.

One of the great advancements of Pioneer 5 is its use of digital data.  Earlier probes used analog data, faithfully transcribing experimental results as a steadily varying voltage that would be transmitted, real-time, to Earth.  Not only can digital data be easily stored so complete results can be sent back to Earth at any time, it also requires no "translation" to a language ground-side computers can understand.  This means that data can be analyzed far more rapidly.

In fact, Pioneer 5's latest space weather report on the cosmic radiation, magnetic field, and micrometeorite situation a million miles out was reduced and presented during the course of the half-hour press conference.  How's that for instant service?

Pioneer also gave an account of its own health.  NASA's week-old baby is healthy and happy: its interior remains at a balmy 63 degrees Fahrenheit, its solar-powered batteries are charging nicely, and the transmitter is strong. 

In the weeks to come, Pioneer 5 will remain on the air out to an anticipated distance of 25,000,000 miles.  This flight will challenge NASA's ability to track and hear the probe to the limits of current technology. 

And, apparently, any notions that I might have a reasonable sleeping schedule!  Not that I'm complaining—it's an amazing time to be alive.

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