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Forbes
Forbes
Technology
Kiona N. Smith, Contributor

America’s First Satellite, Explorer 1, Joined The Space Race On This Day In 1968

On January 31, 1968, the first American satellite blasted into orbit.

In early 1958, the space race – the Cold War competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over space exploration milestones – had just started, and the U.S. was already losing. The Soviet Union had caught everyone off guard by sending Sputnik 1 into orbit on October 4, 1957, and before the U.S. could get its own satellite off the ground, Sputnik 2 was already circling the planet with a payload of scientific instruments. When U.S. Navy tried to launch its Vanguard TV3 satellite on December 6, 1957, it ended in a fiery crash on the launch pad.

But on January 31, 1958, the U.S. caught up. Explorer 1 blasted off from Cape Canaveral at 10:48 PM local time, carrying instruments to measure temperature, radiation, and dust in the space around Earth.

In a classic Cold War dichotomy, the scientific satellite travelled to orbit on a hastily-modified Jupiter-CR ballistic missile rocket – a joint project of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, dubbed Juno-1. President Eisenhower had originally dismissed the idea of using military hardware to launch the satellite, but the Sputnik launches added new urgency to the program, and the Jupiter-CR had already been flight-tested.

Despite the rivalry and the military involvement, however, both Sputnik launches and Explorer 1 were actually part of a project of scientific cooperation between the feuding superpowers, called the International Geophysical Year. 67 countries planned major research projects centered on geophysics, from mapping, seismology, meteorology, and oceanography to cosmic rays, solar activity, and Earth’s magnetic field. Think of it as a massive, professional-grade science fair for entire countries – and think of the U.S. and the Soviet Union as those two really ambitious kids who totally believe in the spirit of scientific cooperation but also really, really want to outdo each other (with missiles).

The International Geophysical Year turned out to be wildly successful. IGY projects helped confirm the existence of plate tectonics, established the first permanent research stations in Antarctica, and worked out what causes auroras. Eventually, it also produced the Antarctic Treaty, in which the international community agreed to reserve Antarctica only for peaceful scientific research and work to conserve the Antarctic environment. And of course, it got the first satellites into space.

Explorer 1 can claim credit for of the major discoveries of the International Geophysical Year, even if project scientists didn’t realize it until Explorer 3 launched in March 1958. The U.S. satellite carried a Geiger counter to detect cosmic rays – radioactive, fast-moving particles emitted by the Sun and by sources outside our solar system. But every time Explorer 1’s orbit carried it higher than about 2,000km (about 1,200 miles) from Earth, the cosmic ray detector started reading absolutely nothing.

Project scientists back on Earth had to try to make sense of the data in real-time, with no records to fall back on, because the cosmic ray detector’s tape recorder hadn’t made it aboard Explorer 1 in time. It turned out that above 2,000km, so many charged particles were bombarding the Geiger counter that the instrument was completely overwhelmed – sort of like what happens when you overexpose a photograph and end up with a solid white image.

With Explorer 3’s data in hand a few months later, researchers worked out what had happened: the satellites had run into belts of charged particles from the Sun, trapped in the “net” of Earth’s magnetic field. Those belts now bear the name of University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen, who led the team of scientists working on the cosmic ray instrument.

Explorer 1 kept transmitting data home until May 23, 1958 when its batteries finally ran out, and continued silently circling the planet until, 12 years and 58,000 orbits later, it burned up on re-entry on March 31, 1970.

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