First Weather Satellite Launched 50 Years Ago 52
stinkbomb writes "Fifty years ago today, the world's first weather satellite lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and opened a new and exciting dimension in weather forecasting. Top leaders from NOAA and NASA hailed the milestone as an example of their agencies' strong partnership and commitment to flying the best satellites today and beyond."
Not a Soviet first? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm surprised the Soviets were not the first with a weather sat. They were pretty much ahead of the space game for several years after Sputnik. They took the first pics of the hidden side of the moon, for example. However, the US was catching up in space electronics pretty fast even though our rocket technology lagged for a while.
Re:Not a Soviet first? (Score:4, Interesting)
Its harder to get good photographs of weather at high latitudes because you either have to do it from high altitude and an oblique angle, or from low altitude in a high inclination orbit. Doing it that way you get two passes at the most per day.
Also, maybe they did have weather satellites but the data wasn't released to civilians because high altitude photography was considered secret.
Questionable "first" anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Already by simply going to wikipedia you can learn that this is not the true first.
History
The first television image of Earth from space from the TIROS-1 weather satellite.
The first weather satellite, Vanguard 2, was launched on February 17, 1959. It was designed to measure cloud cover and resistance, but a poor axis of rotation kept it from collecting a notable amount of useful data.
The first weather satellite to be considered a success was TIROS-1, launched by NASA on 1 April 1960. TIROS operated for 78 days and proved to be much more successful than Vanguard 2. TIROS paved the way for the Nimbus program, whose technology and findings are the heritage of most of the Earth-observing satellites NASA and NOAA have launched since then.
So the first successful one? And who knows what the soviets did, US history has a tendency to ignore the rest of the world. Simple check, see whether helicopters have ejection seats. You might be surprised how many sources claim they don't. Then you know they are using a map where the rest of the world is labeled "Here be dragons".
Re:Not a Soviet first? (Score:5, Interesting)
"I'm surprised the Soviets were not the first with a weather sat."
You don't know how close the space race really was.
A weather sat with a better camera is a spy sat. We were heavily into that as soon as possible, earlier than the Soviets (1959 with Corona and the USSR with Zenit in 1962). A launch of a weather or science satellite also looks the same as a spy satellite. And indeed, the first launches of spy satellites were announced as "Discoverer" science missions.
Interestingly, Yuri Gagarin's capsule was actually the first spy satellite hull. The Soviets sacrificed the first hull to get Yuri in the air, and the second one became the first Zenit spy sat. They were able to accomplish this because in the Soviet system, the whole thing went up and came back, camera and all, for reloading for film. Sending up a delicate (and heavy) camera and bringing it back in one piece is pretty similar to getting a human up and back. The tests with dogs like Laika and the rest were to ensure that they could get the cameras back in one piece just as well as getting a human back.
The US Corona system didn't lend itself to dual use like the Zenit system did - it only ejected film packs to be returned by parachute and retrieved in mid air. There was no need to bring the whole apparatus back.
Eisenhower was excoriated in the press for Sputnik, but declassified docs showed that he was already on the ball by the time the Soviets launched. Since he couldn't say anything about actual spy satellites, he couldn't fend off the press.
Eisenhower also benefited from Sputnik dispelling the notion of "airspace" beyond the Earth's atmosphere - that national borders didn't extend to infinity.
It's all interesting stuff.
Weather sats were a side benefit to the whole cold-war spy business.
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BMO
Re:Space Junk (Score:3, Interesting)
Build and deploy massive blocks of aerogel [wikipedia.org] in orbit and use it to scoop up debris and lost parts. Making it burn up on re-entry might be a problem though.
Re:Not a Soviet first? (Score:3, Interesting)