aphh":2qayah3d said:
MeteorWayne":2qayah3d said:
Actually, Explorer 1 discovered the Van Allen radiation belts, so you can't say it did nothing much
"The discovery of the Van Allen Belts by the Explorer satellites was considered to be one of the outstanding discoveries of the International Geophysical Year.
The acoustic micrometeorite detector detected 145 impacts of cosmic dust in 78,750 seconds. This leads for a twelve-day period to an impact rate of 8.0 × 10-3 impacts m-2 s-1.[19]"
Thanks for that correction, I guess I mixed Explorer 1 to Sputnik 1 that did little else than kept sending tiny beeps over the radio. Perhaps it played some music too.
But Explorer 1 actually had precision instruments and detectors onboard.
Sputnik I had a pronounced effect...far greater than what it did
on orbit...it scared the dog out of us! It disabused the Eisenhour Administration of depending solely on Vanguard to put an American satellite into orbit! It also had a profound effect on our education system...everyone raising a hue and cry asking how these crude, backward Russians could have done such a thing! The following year, for example, the National Science Study Committee of the National Science Foundation put together a high school physics course (which was really basic quantum mechanics). My high school put it in in 1959, and they were mailing (no faxes to speak of in those days) it to the instructor weekly...on mimeographed sheets! I have the final, hardcover version published later, and more widely distributed.
Nothing in the space field since then has caused such a reaction among the general public. Interestingly, the thinking was that if the Soviets could launch a satellite, no matter the size, they must have an ICBM. In point of fact, they did
not just then, as Korolev (sp?)...then known to the outside world only as "The Great Designer" had not whipped the re-entry heating problem, and persuaded Nikita Khruchev that this would intimidate the Free World! It did, of course, but the long-term result wasn't what the Reds expected! As had been the case back then, Americans "got it in gear"! I'm not sure we have the same psyche anymore!
Ad LEO! Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!