 And this talk and the following talk are connected. I'll be talking about the location data collection system on the NIMIS-3, 4, and 6, which were really scientific experiments that were designed for tracking meteorological balloons and buoys and so forth, free-drifting. But there was a spin-off called Search and Rescue that came out of this, and we began to look at it. My talk will be linked to Tim Sinkville, who's sitting here from the NOAA Corps, and he'll follow up with what I say on the operational part of Search and Rescue and how it's evolved and how they're operating the program. So, as I said, NIMIS-3 and 4 had a system called the URLS, the System Interrogation Recording Location, and NIMIS-6 had a scientific experiment. Paul Julian was the PI, and Vern Sumi was the co-I on that, and I was the co-I also. And I'll be talking about some of our Search and Rescue demonstrations here. So here's the URLS System on NIMIS, and you have to remember that this was way before GPS. You'd have to stop when you're on your phone. It's more complicated and sophisticated than what we had here. But this was very early on, and as you can see, we had surface platforms around the world. The satellite was programmed, each orbit with commands for each of these platforms, and the satellite would send a command, and the system would respond, and we'd get a range distance, and it would send a frame of data with sensor data, or as I'll talk later, with some Search and Rescue messages. So this was the URLS System, how it worked. Again, you have to remember that this was not real-time. This was some sickness orbit, so every 12 hours or so, we could get a pass-over of some of these things. But it did serve to demonstrate the concept. Here's some of the early drifting buoy data that we always thought was interesting in the Arctic. Two buoys were deployed here, and they meandered all over the place, and all ended up right in that little fjord. We were very intrigued when that happened. It must have been a down-willing or something that drove them in there. Here's one of our first rescues, you might say. There was a buoy deployed off Puerto Rico. It was operated by the North National Oceanographic Office. It was a very sophisticated, large buoy system. I don't know what it was worth, but it was considered very important for their work, and it broke its mooring. Of course, Nimbus was now tracking it, and with this last location here, we were able to steer a ship to it, and they were totally elated with this. It was the first time we rescued something. It was a drifting buoy, but it saved them a ton of money. I don't remember what the impact would have been otherwise, but it would have been tremendous to recover that thing. They were searching all over the ocean for it. We did a balloon experiment on Nimbus 3, and this was, believe it or not, that's the gondola that flew on a balloon. That little thing, there's our N10, and our box is inside here. That's not our thing. This was under the control of NCAR, and it was just to show that we could track a balloon, because that's really what we were setting out to do eventually. Here's the balloon package that we developed for Nimbus 4. This box is about 12 inches by 6 inches, and they flew quite high, a little solar panel, and we actually launched from Ascension Island. 30 of these went into the tropics and were tracked, and here I show a picture of the launch itself. You see the balloon in that package underneath, and this cart would travel along the runway at Ascension Island at the same velocity as the wind, and when they match, then you can let the balloon rise up vertically, and there's actually another pilot balloon here that it's hard to see that gives the indication that we were at the right velocity. And here's some examples. Blooms went up to 30 millibars, and here's some tracking data from one of those balloons, and you can see that they traveled around the equator, and they never seemed to leave. However, we did have a cut-down mechanism on the balloon case. They drifted over into China or some other country. We actually had to cut down some of that little path there. And eventually we got to the animals. That's a 25-pound package, and we aren't the state of the art. And we actually named that Elk Moe for Moe Schneebaum. And here's Sheila Scott. Sheila is a British pilot. She was a dame. I think that's equivalent to a knight in Britain. And when her organization approached us, it was as if the British government was asking us. So naturally we agreed to track her. And she had a little fiber-ass stack. Her goal was to fly solo around the world, and she was not the first to try that. But part of her flight was a flight over the North Pole. So she was the first female solo pilot to go over the pole on a little plane. So here's the plane. That's our antenna that had to be certified by the FAA. And here's Sheila's flight over the pole. At this point, I want to mention that this is just a part of her round-the-world trip. She went to countries all over the world. And every time she landed, there seemed to be a crisis. Not bad, it was bad, or the plane engine was overheating. There was always a crisis, and actually, you know, the reporters were there, and she was in the newspapers and so forth. And we started to worry about this leg of the mission because this was going to be kind of hazardous flying from here all the way over there with nothing in here. And by the time we got to Norway, the time we got there, we didn't have much choice. We had an astronaut with us giving her instructions, by the way. And then she took off, and my gosh, she went right over that pole as fast, as clear as we could see. She went right over the top of it. And then flew over to Alaska, to Barter Island, where the radar picked her up, and then she continued on. And when she finally landed, somebody told me they heard a sigh of relief from NASA headquarters out in Greenbelt. And she wrote a book. It was an interesting book she published with the whole story of this. So Sheila didn't need to be rescued, but she did have a code that she would have sent that told us that she needed help if she needed it. Moving on to Nimbus 6. Now, this is the Torley experiment. I mentioned Paul Julian and Vern Sumi were the quitsables on here. And this... I keep hitting that darn button. This didn't have the command link down that I talked about on the urls. These platforms, balloons and buoys, had timers. They transmitted one pulse per second. One second per 60 seconds, rather. And they were random, totally random, incoherent. And that time shift and the Doppler shift combined would enable us to have as many as 200 in the field of view. And the mutual interference, even though they were transmitting randomly, was so low that it was not negligible. And so the equipment that was on the platforms was obviously smaller and lighter and lower power, and Doppler was used here. And again, the main purpose of this was the balloon and the buoys. Now, here's an example. Here's a picture of our balloon package that we developed for that system. That antenna is a piece of mylar, and that's about two feet tall. And this balloon had been designed so it was non-hazardous to an aircraft or an airliner, a passenger airliner. And we actually did extensive testing of this to make sure that if an airline hit this anywhere along the path, a string, it would ingest the package and grind it up, it would be no problem. Fortunately, we never heard of any attempt to do that, and I'm glad it wasn't an airplane that tried it. But here's some balloon data from that experiment. Again, this was Paul Joine, and Vern Sume had this experiment down here in the bottom, and Paul was interested in this tracking data. And my role was to deliver the spacecraft processor, and I wanted to give some credit to Mord Friedman here, who gave us the idea for the processor that we used to process that data. So here's a buoy, an electronic unit, and that's about 12, 14 inches. And here's an example of a free-drifting buoy. I don't remember how many we had, but there were a lot of them. And you can see the drog would be dropped down and that would capture the subsurface current, and that's how the buoy would be propelled, and we would track the free-drifting buoy. And here's an example of what the buoy looked like. Ron Browning mentioned the double eagle in his talk. This was a real rescue. This was our first real rescue. Three fellows were going to attempt to cross the Atlantic in a balloon, an air balloon from here, Cape Code, all the way over to Paris. The flight should have taken them like that. And they got caught in this circulation here, and they had to be rescued. They sent the code. We had a code in the package, and they sent it. We detected it, and that's the Coast Guard vessel, and you see a little black circle shows our antenna on that little gondola. That's the gondola that was suspended below the balloon, and it floated, fortunately. And so there were three men in there that were rescued because of data. So that was kind of setting the stage for the technology that was evolving there. This is the same experiment. I talked about the fact that we had to rescue them there, but they didn't give up. And they tried it again, and here they finally got the arc right, and they landed in Paris. And in the back there's a poster with their pictures, and we had a press conference that they came back out to Goddard. Here's another interesting experiment we did, headed towards Fish and Rescue. This fellow's name was Naomi Uemura, a Japanese explorer, and he was going to... Well, he did. He took a dog sled. He took a dog sled over Greenland, all the way across from north to south as a solo, and he was collecting scientific data along the way, and there's our antenna. And it was... I don't remember the exact duration, but he had to be resupplied with food and other things. And the way that worked is he had a pilot. A Canadian pilot would take our position that we had and start flying towards that position, and eventually he'd come into radio contact with Naomi, and what would happen is Naomi would watch the dogs, the dogs that would hear the aircraft before he did. So he would tell the pilot where the dogs were looking, and then the pilot would use that heading in our location to zoom in on them, and he came right in. So he had the satellite and the human and the dogs all working together. And it worked very well. But he didn't have to be rescued. He never used the code. This is the list of experiments that we had on that... There were 49 of them. These are some prominent scientists in here. And at the end of the Nimbus 7 tourally experiment, this list was sent over to NOAA. NOAA was getting ready to launch the Argos system, which is an operational version of what we just talked about. And it led them into the operation field. So most of those users that we indoctrinated and showed how to treat the data joined Argos. And of course this is still running today, as far as I know. And in 04, when I last showed this data, they had 400 programs and a lot of platforms on the earth. They were charging for it. This was operational, but it was a non-profit. It wasn't a profitable organization here. And eventually, they began experimenting with the use of GPS when it finally came along. So it was a very successful program and that laid the basis for the following. So here's the evolution of some of that technology. You married that 25-pound pack as well. Now they got smaller. And here's a polar bear. These are from Argos now. And they even got the birds. And they still do birds. Here's the evolution. Here's the concept that starts that. I have to give Bill Reddy some credit here for this because this was not an easy program to sell. You might think Search and Rescue is so noble and so beneficial that you could easily sell it. But we had a heck of a time. We wouldn't believe the things we were told of it. And I'll mention it later. But this is the Coast Masses of Russia. And this program eventually had the U.S., France, Canada and Russia, four countries. And Bill gets credit for working that whole community, including NASA headquarters, by the way, in order to pull this together. It was not easy to sell, as I mentioned. Bill and Bernie Trudell and myself. Bernie and I worked for Bill at that time. And we went to headquarters after a year of developing this plan and presented it and we were told to go home. NASA was not going to be buying a system to save people that can afford to buy their own airplane. That's what we were told. We were devastated. And then all of a sudden, Senator Hale Boggs from Mississippi, a real close, powerful guy, was lost in Alaska and didn't have any transmitter. And all of a sudden, we got called back to headquarters. And from that on, we had a program. In 1985, and again, I mentioned these countries. Today, well, when I showed this chart 10 years ago at the 40th, there were 38 countries in the program. There's probably more than that now. This is the number where they gave me at that time. And I think what's happening now is you'll hear from me from Tim. The GPS and geostationary satellites are now taken over. We had the polar orbit with the time delay between the passes, 12 hours. And this, of course, gives you real time. So in order to help promote that system, we made these bumper stickers and encouraged people to help support our program.