“Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the Earth. Some 40 of them were made in the United States of America. Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. TIROS satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.”

The TIROS-1 satellite (shown above) was launched on April 1, 1960, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and carried two TV cameras and two video recorders. RCA, a major TV and radio manufacturer, primarily built the satellite. Short for Television InfraRed Observational Satellite, TIROS weighed 122 kg and only stayed up for 78 days. Nevertheless, it showed the practicality of using the dynamics of electromagnetism for viewing cloud formations and observing patterns for weather event prediction.

President Dwight Eisenhower had been secretly coordinating the space program as part of the Cold War since the early 1950s. He had become accustomed to the valuable photographic information obtained from spy planes. When the new administration took office in early 1953, tensions with Communist countries increased rapidly. After the USSR conducted successful atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, he considered satellites a crucial new Cold War technology.

Eisenhower’s “New Look” policy identified aerospace as a decisive component of future US military strategy. The D-Day successful invasion of Europe, which he had managed as the head of the Allied Forces during World War II, had been meticulously reconnoitered with low and high-altitude photography from various reconnaissance aircraft. Given the growing nuclear capacity of the USSR, he particularly wanted satellites that could assess how rapidly the Communists were producing its long-range bombers and where they were being stationed. In addition, as the Soviets began to deploy rocket technology siphoned from defeated Nazi Germany, locating and monitoring launchpads with nuclear ballistic missiles became important.

The top-secret Corona spy program was the first attempt to start mapping the Earth from space with satellites. Their Corona spacecraft were built by Lockheed Martin for the CIA and Air Force and equipped with 70mm “Keyhole” cameras. These started with an imaging resolution of approximately 40 feet, enough to locate airfields and large rockets.

The destruction of an American U-2 spy plane during a USSR overflight on May 1, 1960, accelerated the need for satellite-based surveillance. President Eisenhower had proposed an “open skies” plan at a 1955 Summit conference in Geneva with England, France, and Russia that would allow each country to make flights over each others’ sovereign territory to conduct inspections of launchpads capable of rocketing Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) into space. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had refused the proposal and ordered missiles to bring down the high-altitude US spy plane. Khrushchev took pleasure in displaying the wreckage for the international press and in the following show trial for pilot Francis Gary Powers. The U-2 would once again show its value when it detected Soviet missiles in Cuba, but the new competition to conquer space would dramatically improve aerospace technology and the ability to see from space.

Like most of the early US attempts to achieve space flight, the first Keyhole-equipped satellites failed to achieve orbit or suffered other technical failures. The US had also obtained its rocket technology from the Nazis, and early adaptions such as the A-4 and Redstone rockets required much testing before reliable launches occurred. This knowledge was applied to the next generation Thor-Agena rockets that were used as launch vehicles for Corona spy satellites from June 1959. By the late summer of 1960, a capsule containing the first Keyhole film stock was retrieved in mid-air by an Air Force cargo plane as it parachuted back down to Earth. By 1963, Keyhole resolution had increased to 10 feet and to 5 feet by 1967.

The USSR, though, set a precedent for orbital overflight with its Sputnik satellites. While Eisenhower had sought at the Geneva Summit to assure the world of its peaceful intentions in space, the Soviets launched an R-7 ICBM 100 km into space two years later with a payload the size of a beach ball called the Sputnik. It is still a matter of speculation whether Eisenhower baited the USSR into going into orbital space first, but when the US and other countries around the world failed to protest the overflight of Sputnik, it set the legal precedent for satellites flying over other countries.

As the “Space Race” heated up during the mid-1960s, rocket capabilities improved and new applications were being conceived. The Mercury and Gemini space capsules began to use innovative photographic technologies to capture Earth images. Weather satellites like the TIROS-1 had been monitoring Earth’s atmosphere since 1960, and the idea of sensing land and ocean terrains was being developed. Although the details of the spy satellites were highly classified, enough information about the possibilities of high-altitude sensing of earth terrains circulated in the scientific community. In 1965, William Pecora, the director of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), proposed that a satellite program could gather information about the natural resources of our planet. The idea of remote sensing was born, and the USGS would partner with NASA to take the lead.

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had been created in 1958 to engage the public’s imagination and support for the civilian uses of spacecraft. The Apollo program was conceived as early as 1960 and eventually would reach the Moon. The program also sparked reflection, not just on reaching the apex of an extraordinary human journey, but on the origins of that trip. We went to the Moon, but we also discovered our home planet, what Buckminster Fuller called “Spaceship Earth.”

History was made on Aug. 23, 1966, when the first photo of the Earth from the perspective of the Moon was transmitted by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter I. It was received at the NASA tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid, Spain. The image was taken during the spacecraft’s 16th orbit and was the first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the Moon. The Lunar Orbiter was a series of five unmanned missions designed to help select landing sites for the Apollo. In mapping the Moon’s surface, they pioneered some of the earliest remote sensing techniques.

In 1966, the USGS and the Department of the Interior (DOI) began working together to produce their own Earth-observing satellite program. Unfortunately, they faced many obstacles, including budget problems due to the increasing costs of the war in Vietnam. But they persevered, and on July 23, 1972, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS) was launched. It was soon called Landsat 1, the first of the series of satellites launched to observe and study the Earth’s land masses. It carried a system of cameras built for remote sensing by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) called the Return Beam Vidicon (RBV). Three independent cameras sensed different spectral wavelengths to obtain visible and near-infrared (IR) photographic images of the Earth. RBV data was processed to 70 millimeter (mm) black and white film rolls by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and then analyzed and archived by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center.

The second device on Landsat-1 was the Multispectral Scanner (MSS), built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. It provided radiometric images of the Earth through the ability to distinguish very slight differences in energy and continues to be a major contributor to Earth sensing data.

The Landsat satellite program has been the longest-running program for the acquisition and archiving of satellite-based images of Earth. Since the early 1970s, Landsat satellites have constantly circled the Earth, taking pictures, collecting “spectral information,” and storing them for scientific and emergency management services. These images serve various uses – from gauging global agricultural production to monitoring the risks of natural disasters.

A successful partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Landsat’s critical role is monitoring, analyzing, and managing the earth resources needed for sustainable human environments. It manages and provides the largest archive of remotely sensed – current and historical – land data in the world. Landsat uses a passive approach, measuring light and other energy reflected or emitted from the Earth. Much of this light is scattered by the atmosphere, but techniques have been developed for the Landsat space vehicles to improve image quality dramatically. Each day, Landsat-8 adds another 700 high-resolution images to an unparalleled database, allowing researchers to assess changes in Earth’s landscape over time. Landsat-9 will has even more sophisticated technologies and was launched into space in September 2021 replacing Landsat 7. It has better radiometric and geometric imaging capacity than previous Landsats, adding about 1,400 scenes per day to the Landsat global land archive publicly available from USGS.

Since 1960, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has worked with NASA to build and operate two fleets of satellites to monitor the Earth. One is the Polar-orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES) that fly north and south over the Arctic and Antarctica regions. These make about 14 orbits a day, with each rotation covering a different band of the Earth.

The other are the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system (GOES) that operate in the higher geosynchronous “Clarke Belt.” This position allows them to measure reflected radiation and some Earth-emitted energies from a single stationary source over set locations. It then records a wide range of atmospheric and terrestrial information for weather and potential disaster warnings.

Both the Landsat satellites and the GOES satellites provide a constant stream of data and imagery to help understand weather events and earth resources. Both are vital to observing current meteorological and land-based events that warrant monitoring, study, and reporting.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2017, Mar 27). That Remote Look: History of Sensing Satellites. apennings.com https://apennings.com/digital-geography/that-remote-look-history-of-sensing-satellites/

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

---

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught at Hannam University in South Korea and from 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, Marist College in New York, and Victoria University in New Zealand. He has also spent time as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Related

Category: digital geography, food policy and security, geopolitical risk, science and technology studies, space systems, visual literacy and rhetoric
Tags: Arthur C. Clarke > Clarke Belt > Cold War > Commercialization of Cold War technology > disaster risk reduction > Francis Gary Powers > geosynchronous orbit > GOES > JFK > John F. Kennedy > Keyhole satellites > Landsat > Landsat 9 > RCA satellites > Sputnik > TIROS > U-2 spy plane

Comments

Comments are closed.