First Contact: Sputnik
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First Contact: Sputnik
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
October 02, 2007
To say the least, it was incredible. The news relayed by the voice on
the other end of the phone line hit the president of the San Gabriel
Valley Radio Club like a blow to the head. Too incredible, Henry
Richter
hoped, to be true.
Hope was something Richter knew quite well. It went with the job. Not
only as president of a local ham radio club; although you always hoped
the guy on the other side of the world talking to you over the
shortwave
would have something interesting to say. No, Richter's familiarity
with
hope came as a charter member of the nascent space exploration
industry.
"Some of the things that occurred during that period I can recall like
they happened yesterday," said 80-year-old Richter. "There was a
warning
that it was going to happen, but they were so secretive about
everything. Why would they change now?"
The warning materialized in the form of a phone call from Richter's
boss, William Pickering, the director of the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory.
Pickering was attending meetings in Washington when he heard from a
Russian scientist that the Soviets would launch a satellite in the
near
future.
On October 4 at 10:28 p.m. Moscow time, a brilliant and deafening
detonation of smoke and flame illuminated the Soviet Union's rocket
test
site near Tyuratam, Kazkhistan, as the 32 nozzles announced the rise
of
the Russian R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile. 295 seconds and
142
miles later, the last of the R-7's engines shut down for good. Soon
after, pneumatic locks were activated, a nosecone fairing separated,
and
an antenna spike was released. Then, in one final act that signaled
the
dawn of the space age, a pushrod connected to a bulkhead of the R-7
was
activated, shoving a 183-pound beach ball-sized aluminum sphere into
the
cold, harsh blackness of space. Sputnik had arrived.
"I was in my office in Building 125 at JPL when Dr. Pickering called
again," said Richter. "I do not recall exactly what was said but it
was
a short conversation about Sputnik. I then went to a radio receiver
and
tried to dial it in."
The Russians were advertising that signals from their satellite could
be
received on a frequency 20 MHz (megacycles). But all Richter could
dial
in was static. He immediately suspected the high-tension wires located
on a hill above JPL were blocking out the frequency. So the U.S. Navy
veteran and Caltech graduate got on the phone, but not to his boss
Pickering this time. Instead, he called a friend, and more
importantly,
a member of the San Gabriel Valley Radio Club.
"Bob Legg had a lot of ingenuity and his own ham setup, and he lived
in
nearby Temple City," said Richter. "At the time there were no high
tension wires near Bob's home, so he had a clear shot at receiving a
signal."
The one thing Legg did not have was an antenna that could pick up
transmissions on 20 MHz. So the resourceful Legg looked around his
house
and found something he thought could do the job: a wire-mesh mosquito
screen on one of his windows. He ran a wire from the screen to his
radio, dialed in 20 MHz and listened.
"When Bob called me back and said he'd heard it I sort of went numb,"
said Richter. "America had been working toward being first in space.
The
United States had plans on launching a Navy satellite called Vanguard
in
the coming months. And the Russians had beaten us to it."
As stunned as Richter felt, he knew he still had a job to do. There
were
many questions to be answered. What could our Cold War enemies do that
we could not? What exactly was it that was placed in an orbit above
our
heads? And most immediate, what was the significance of the continuous
string of pulse transmissions radiating out of Sputnik? Richter knew
his
country's leaders would need these answers as soon as possible. He
also
knew that JPL was one of the few places in the nation with personnel
who
had the knowledge, training and equipment to tell them.
Richter and three others piled JPL's best radio gear into a trailer,
hooked it to a JPL truck and headed as far away from those infernal
high-tension wires as they could. An hour later they pulled up to the
substation of the Temple City Sheriff's Department.
"We went here because they were part of a disaster preparedness group.
I
knew they had a ham radio station and that they could get clear
signals
from their location," said Richter, "which was appropriate because
this
certainly qualified as a disaster in my book. Furthermore, the hams
had
built a Microlock Station there in anticipation of tracking our
American
satellite."
Moments after arrival, the JPLers hooked into the station's power
supply, powered up their best receiver, adjusted their antenna and
waited. They soon became among the first humans to hear the
'beep-beep-beep' that was announcing the birth of the space age.
In the name of national security Richter and company soon took over
the
basement of the sheriff's building and set up for the long haul.
"It came in loud and clear," said Richter. "But we did more than
listen.
We took audio on a reel-to-reel recorder and rolls of strip chart
plots
of these first signals. We were looking for anything, trying to
decipher
the significance of what Sputnik was sending out." (+ Click here to
listen to actual recordings of Sputnik
<http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/audioclips/sputnik-beep.mp3>).
Over the next days, weeks and even months, the significance of
Sputnik's
signals was fiercely debated. Some scientists stated the space
transmissions were simply a carrier signal, intended to assist in the
confirmation and tracking of the satellite. Others charged that the
Soviets were receiving scientific information from Sputnik in code.
While the debate raged, Richter and his group concentrated on the job
at
hand. Ensconced in the sheriff's basement, they did not immediately
appreciate the effect the Soviet achievement had on world opinion. As
they monitored and documented the satellite's orbits, the word Sputnik
itself, which means "companion" in Russian, quickly became part of the
American lexicon. Sputnik was on the front page of just about every
major newspaper in America. Within days of their discovery, a wave of
VIPs began streaming in to the Temple City Sheriff's Department to
hear
for themselves what America's Cold War enemies had achieved.
"JPL and Caltech staff were dropping by to get an earful and it soon
got
pretty crowded in that basement," said Richter. "Then the media came,
including the three networks. There were so many people crowded into
that small room, it got to be too much. So I said the next guy to come
down those stairs was getting kicked out. Sure enough, here comes
someone and without looking I told him to get the heck out. Turns out,
it was the Under-Sheriff Pitchess of Los Angeles County. It was his
station and he could have kicked me out, but instead he turned around
and left his own basement; more than once he referred to that incident
publicly. He was a proud American and knew we were doing important
work."
JPL's important work in the basement of the Temple City Sheriff's
Department would go on for several months. But well before Sputnik
gave
its final beep 22 days later, Richter was pulled away to work on
another
important project. On behalf of JPL and his boss Dr. William
Pickering,
Richter crisscrossed the country, representing the team that would
find
the perfect instruments to go into a JPL-made satellite.
The first chance to reach the high ground of space came two months and
two days later.
At 11:45 AM on December 6, 1957, a nationwide audience watched as the
Navy's Vanguard rocket, the United States first orbital space attempt,
exploded on the pad. America's next shot at the high ground came from
JPL and the US Army's Explorer program.
"Explorer was a crash program," said Richter. "We were determined to
get
this thing up one way or another and Sputnik merely pushed the
button."
On January 31, 1958, a Juno rocket climbed eastward into the night's
sky
over Cape Canaveral, Florida. Within minutes, the Juno and its cargo,
the JPL-manufactured satellite called Explorer 1, disappeared over the
horizon -- its fate unknown.
"I was at the Cape that night waiting for our JPL listening post on
the
West Coast to confirm that they heard signals coming down from the
satellite," said Richter. "We had all these listening posts and the
first call I get is from one of my club's ham radio operators saying
they were receiving Explorer 1. My guys were first to hear we made it,
that we made it for America."
The 50th Anniversary of JPL's Explorer 1 mission is January 31, 2008.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Media contact: DC Agle/JPL
818-393-9011
Revision
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
Dale Carlson
>http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1487
>
>First Contact: Sputnik
>Jet Propulsion Laboratory
>October 02, 2007
>
>The Russians were advertising that signals from their satellite could
>be received on a frequency 20 MHz (megacycles). But all Richter could
>dial in was static. He immediately suspected the high-tension wires located
>on a hill above JPL were blocking out the frequency. So the U.S. Navy
>veteran and Caltech graduate got on the phone, but not to his boss
>Pickering this time. Instead, he called a friend, and more
>importantly, a member of the San Gabriel Valley Radio Club.
>
>"Bob Legg had a lot of ingenuity and his own ham setup, and he lived
>in nearby Temple City," said Richter. "At the time there were no high
>tension wires near Bob's home, so he had a clear shot at receiving a
>signal."
>
>The one thing Legg did not have was an antenna that could pick up
>transmissions on 20 MHz. So the resourceful Legg looked around his
>house and found something he thought could do the job: a wire-mesh
>mosquito screen on one of his windows. He ran a wire from the screen
>to his radio, dialed in 20 MHz and listened.
This strikes me as just plain wierd. The wavelength of a 20 MHz signal
(probably more commonly called 20 Mcs at the time) is very close to
15 meters (a popular ham band, even in 1957). His wire-mesh mosquito
screen just happened to be resonant at 20 Mhz? Apparently he didn't
have an antenna tuner, as a simple end-fed wire a bit over 15 meters
long (or half that length) should have been able to be tuned to 20 MHz
pretty easily. Or cut a wire to around 14.9896229 meters, if you
need perfect resonance at 20 MHz without a tuner.
The wire-mesh mosquito screen image seems to suggest that Sputnik
was broadcasting on some then-exotic microwave frequency or something.
Maybe that was the slightly misleading intention of the story? Just a
random length of wire 20 feet or so long can be easily made resonant
at 14.9896229 meters with a simple tuner, assuming the signal was so
weak to make perfect antenna resonance neccesary. Or an incredibly
common at the time 40 meter band ham antenna should have easily been
able to pick up the signal with little or no tuning.
Sorry- probably just nit-picking, but this strikes me as being very
odd, and possibly highly dumbed-down or romanticized. Same goes
for the "high-tension-wires" stuff...
Dale
KJ7SL
Dale Carlson
>This strikes me as just plain wierd.
As does my interpretation of the spelling of "weird" :)
Dale
Pat Flannery
Dale Carlson wrote:
> This strikes me as just plain wierd. The wavelength of a 20 MHz signal
> (probably more commonly called 20 Mcs at the time) is very close to
> 15 meters (a popular ham band, even in 1957).
>
The Soviets picked the frequencies used (20 and 40 MHz) to make it easy
for radio amateurs to receive it with their equipment:
http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2007/09/28/03/
Pat