Talkative Satellite

As they circle the earth, crossing each other's orbits every 50 minutes or so, the U.S. satellite Explorer and the Soviet Sputnik II stay true to their national characters. Sputnik II is silent now, but even before its radio went dead its instruments talked in a secret code, and last week the Russians were still taciturn about its coded reports on conditions in space.* But the Explorer, a talkative American working in a published code, was droning away in the clear to all who would listen.

Around the world, both hams and professional radio stations picked up the Explorer's signals, sometimes recorded them on magnetic tape. They poured reports from the satellite's instruments into IGY headquarters in Washington and other official centers, in an ever-increasing flood. Analysis of the reports is a long, painstaking business, but already some of the data have been made public. The Explorer's orbit has been pinpointed fairly accurately (see diagram). According to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, Mass., it crosses the equator at an angle of 33.5DEG, and takes 115 minutes to complete a circuit of the earth. The Smithsonian scientists do not think this figure will change appreciably for about seven years. Other early reports showed:

P: Two of the fine wires in the Explorer's meteor-detecting grids have been broken, presumably by micrometeorites. The microphone inside the satellite also picked up the impact of an object against the satellite's skin.

P:The temperature inside the Explorer has been fairly moderate in spite of the contrast between the heat of sunlight and the intense cold in the shadow of the earth. It has ranged from 50DEG to 85DEG F., about the spread of temperature of an average spring day in the Southwest.

P: Cosmic ray intensity, the third space factor observed by the Explorer, is harder to interpret. Apparently the average increase above the intensity at the surface of the earth--twelve times--is about what was expected. More interesting are hints that cosmic rays in space may fluctuate considerably with time, and vary from place to place. Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa says that a radio station in Tokyo that was picking up the satellite's signals last week noted a sudden increase in cosmic rays to as much as five times above normal. If this observation proves correct, it will be a landmark in cosmic ray study.

*Under the rules of the International Geophysical Year, the Russians are supposed to make all the data public within eight months of receiving them.'They still have six months' time for Sputnik I, and not even the obvious propaganda advantage has hurried them into publication.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.