Slow Death

When the radio beeps of Sputnik I died away in late October, most of the world's Sputnik watchers, official and unofficial, lost track of it. But not Engineer-Astronomer John Daniel Kraus, professor of electrical engineering at Ohio State University, who worked out a clever system of his own for watching beepless Sputniks. Last week Professor Kraus asserted that he had observed the disintegration and presumptive death of Sputnik I.

As a free Sputnik detector, Dr. Kraus, 47, uses the 20-megacycle radio time signal sent out 24 hours a day by the National Bureau of Standards' station WWV near Washington, D.C. In daytime the signal reflects strongly from the ionosphere, but at night the ionosphere is less effective, so the signal gets much weaker. When a small meteor streaks across the sky, it leaves behind it a trail of ionized air that acts as a small reflector. The ionized air increases the strength of the Washington time signals for a couple of seconds.

Dr. Kraus was familiar with this effect, so when Sputnik I took to space, he went after it, antenna pointing like a hunter zeroing in on a duck. The satellite, moving at near meteor speed, and much bigger than common meteors, performed magnificently, leaving an ionized trail at each night passage. The trail reflected the time signal strongly for as much as a minute. The bursts of reflected waves came from just the right places and at just the right times to fit the satellite's slowly shifting orbit.

During the last week of December, said Dr. Kraus, Sputnik I began to break up. Night after night, Kraus tracked three pieces--one of them may have been the nose cone, but the other two were certainly fragments of the satellite itself. Between Jan. 2 and 5, two of the pieces broke into smaller bits and spiraled closer to earth. On Jan. 6 he distinguished eight distinct fragments, all of them still orbiting, but at slightly different speeds. Toward the end, it took as much as 30 minutes for the procession to cross Ohio. Dr. Kraus thinks that the Sputnik's thin metal skin disintegrated first, allowing its contents (batteries, instruments, radio apparatus, etc.) to come apart bit by bit.

On Jan. 7 one of the eight fragments failed to show up. Next day three more were gone. On Jan. 9 a single fragment spread its little ionosphere for Dr. Kraus to record. It appeared again on Jan. 10, but on Jan. 11 Dr. Kraus searched the sky in vain.

Dr. Kraus is not grieving for Sputnik I; he is waiting for the breakup of dog-carrying Sputnik II. He tracked it over Ohio early last week, but recently it has been crossing the campus during daytime and early evening hours, when the Kraus detection system does not work. Soon he will start watching again for its disintegration, dead dog and all.

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