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National Geographic : 1960 Aug
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Tiros, Perched on the Nose of Its Rocket, Roars Off for the Heavens Here, seconds after blast-off, the 90-foot, three-stage Thor Able lifts majestically from its pad at Cape Canaveral. The umbilical tower, last link with earth, topples amid fire and vapor. Plastic shroud at the rocket's tip protects the sat ellite during the ascent, then falls away to expose the solar cells at left. Cells that convert solar en ergy into battery power glisten from the sides of the 264-pound satellite. Its four antennas have flashed thousands of television images since Tiros took off. Adjusting the lens of the sat ellite's wide-angle camera is Herbert Butler of the United States Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where many of Tiros's televi sion pictures have been re ceived. Sidney Sternberg (right) represents RCA, which designed the satellite for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. KODACHROME(LEFT) BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICPHOTOGRAPHERW. D. VAUGHN; EKTACHROMEBY NASA © N.G.S. every 100 minutes. Thanks largely to a rocket guidance system developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories, its orbit varies only slightly from a perfect circle-as of its launching date the most precise achieved by any satellite. Thus Tiros I, the United States' eighteenth satellite in orbit around the earth, became man's first weather eye in the sky. The brains controlling the eye acted through two data acquisition sites-one at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the other at Kaena Point, Hawaii. Pictures Stored by Tape Recorder When the satellite flashed within range of one of these stations to begin another photo taking orbit, an engineer gave it a spate of prearranged orders. Via radio, he could tell Tiros when to start its next sequence of 32 pictures-perhaps as it whizzed over Africa 15 minutes later-and which of its television cameras to use. Its orders memorized elec 294 tronically, the satellite spun on its way. Precisely at the 15-minute mark, over Africa, its camera began snapping; but Tiros was then too far from either data site to trans mit pictures directly-as it did when photo graphing within range of a station. Instead, a tape recorder automatically stored the views as they were snapped at 30-second intervals. On its return passage the engineer issued an other order, and the satellite dutifully beamed the photographs to the station. Of Tiros's two TV cameras, one-fitted with a wide-angle lens-focused upon a vast area three times as large as France; the other scanned in greater detail a square 100 miles by 100 miles. Each camera, about the size of a water glass and weighing only two pounds, peered at the earth through a picture tube narrower than a man's finger. Whenever I was in a data station during Tiros's 10-minute passage, excitement among
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