NASA - Launch of Explorer I - 50th Aniversary

Explorer-I, officially known as Satellite 1958 Alpha, was the first United States earth satellite and was sent aloft as part of the United States program for the International Geophysical Year 1957-1958. It was designed and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology under the direction of Dr. William H. Pickering. The satellite instrumentation of Explorer-I was designed and built by Dr. James Van Allen of the State University of Iowa.

The satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy) in Florida at 10:48 P.M. EST on 31 January 1958 by the Jupiter-C vehicle--a special modification of the Redstone ballistic missile--that was designed, built, and launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) under the direction of Dr. Wernher Von Braun. Jupiter-C, a direct descendant of the German A-4 (V-2) rocket, was originally developed in 1955-1956 as a high-performance rocket for testing purposes.

The Jupiter-C has its origins in the United States Army's Project Orbiter in 1954. The project was canceled in 1955, however when the decision was made to proceed with Project Vanguard.

Following the launch of the Soviet Sputnik I on 4 October 1957, ABMA was directed to proceed with the launching of a satellite using the Jupiter-C, which had already been flight-tested in nose-cone re-entry tests for the Jupiter intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM). Working closely together, ABMA and JPL completed the job of modifying the Jupiter-C and building the Explorer-I in 84 days.

Once in orbit, the cosmic ray equipment of Explorer-I indicated a much lower cosmic ray count than had been anticipated. Dr. Van Allen theorized that the equipment may have been saturated by very strong caused by the existence of a belt of charged particles trapped in space by the earth's magnetic field. The existence of these Van Allen Belts, discovered by Explorer-I, was confirmed by Explorer-III, which was launched by a Jupiter-C on 26 March 1958.

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.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• NASA
• Explorer
• Space
• Science
• satellite

[irish89055]

our Germans are better than their Germans...

[Jonny7nasa]

Absolutely brilliant..man has come along way since then..thanks for posting this video

[MrGchiasson]

I love it," Hey, the electrical-relay-thingy is stuck"...ah..go ahead and launch anyway..We'll be awright. God I miss those days! Today, you'd have some bureaucratic committee and twenty computers analyzing to find the answer. But then...today we'd have to ask the Russians for a hitch-hike into space.. We've come a long way... uh huh.

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[citrus1banana]

In the days of Apollo and the shuttle, people would call a hold imediately rather than just telling the German scientist looking out the window about it and him telling you "Go ahead".

It made it to orbit anyway.

The fins look like the predecessors of the Redstone fins... they say van Braun had a thing for fins...

[RedAshHope]

Great film

[artwleb]

Nice inside view of countdown operations....

[blobrana]

cool