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NJ Museum Revives TIROS Satellite Dish After 40 Years

Posted by timothy on from the zip-zooming-along dept.

evanak writes TIROS was NASA's Television Infrared Observation Satellite. It launched in April 1960. One of the ground tracking stations was located at the U.S. Army's secret "Camps Evans" Signals Corps electronics R&D laboratory. That laboratory (originally a Marconi wireless telegraph lab) became the InfoAge Science Center in the 2000s. [Monday], after many years of restoration, InfoAge volunteers (led by Princeton U. professor Dan Marlowe) successfully received data from space. The dish is now operating for the first time in 40 years! The received data are in very raw form, but there is a clear peak riding on top of the noise background at 0.4 MHz (actually 1420.4 MHz), which is the well-known 21 cm radiation from the Milky Way. The dish was pointing south at an elevation of 45 degrees above the horizon.

28 comments

  1. A lack of details for this technical audience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is it just a big metal reflector in space or did they somehow revive its power source?

    1. Re:A lack of details for this technical audience by HughPickens.com · · Score: 2

      You are thinking of Echo - 1 and Echo-2 which were just large metalized balloon satellites that acted as passive reflectors of microwave signals (although they did have beacons to provide telemetry). Echo 2 was the more impressive with a diameter of 41.1-meters. Echo 2 orbited in a near polar orbit, and was conspicuously visible to the unaided eye over all of the Earth. I remember our high school physics class going out at night to watch it pass overhead. It was huge. Echo 2 reentered Earth's atmosphere and burned up on June 7, 1969.

  2. Tiros: first global weather photo by mrthoughtful · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Although I personally find the idea of resurrecting an old dish rather 'non-news', Tiros was pretty cool series of satellites. Here is the the first (composite) photo of global weather taken using the infrared cameras on an early Tiros: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-16...

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    1. Re: Tiros: first global weather photo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Why is that site giving me a cert error? And whybwould NASA be using Symantec certs instead of USG ones (DOD makes their own, after all)?

    2. Re: Tiros: first global weather photo by mrthoughtful · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yea, odd.. Actually the http server delivers the same picture - cf. http://history.nasa.gov/SP-168...

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    3. Re:Tiros: first global weather photo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hack attack in that link.

    4. Re: Tiros: first global weather photo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      It gives you errors because, while the certificate is an actual, valid certificate, it wasn't created for the subdomain they have it installed on.

  3. how much fuel is left? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Trying to read the article (which link is is anyway?) some of these links are not loading.

    Anyway, how much fuel does this thing have left?

    1. Re: how much fuel is left? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I think there's more than one TIROS/N sat in use, the last reaching orbit in 1998. That's not what this article is about: these guys reactivated an old tracking station on NJ (which can hardly be called Earth), not an old satellite.

    2. Re:how much fuel is left? by mbone · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not that you would know it from the summary, but they have revived the dish, not the Satellite. They are receiving natural radio waves, nothing from TIROS.

    3. Re:how much fuel is left? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not True... TIROS-N/NOAA 15 is still operational... the peak you see in that transmission is the data from NOAA 15.

    4. Re:how much fuel is left? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And that has nothing at all to do with this article.

      The article is about a radio receiver dish on the ground - one that was first constructed to receive signals from a certain satellite. The satellite it was build for is long since dead. The fact that there is a modern satellite of similar name has nothing to do with this story. The fact that it was built for the TIROS I satellite is even irrelevant to the story.

      The story is about refurbishing a radio receiver dish on the ground, and receiving data from it. The data is raw radio noise, not any particular satellite's signal. The peak they are talking about is natural, not from any artificial satellite.

  4. Great summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    'Reviving' a structure on earth is not really very impressive? The accomplishment touted here is the restoration of a dish on the ground that was used to communicate with TIROS satellites, the satellites themselves,while interesting in their own right, are not part of this story.

  5. It's a radio telescope by mbone · · Score: 2

    So, they have shown that they can mount a receiver on an existing radio telescope, and receive radio waves.

    That's cool and all, but not exactly newsworthy.

    1. Re:It's a radio telescope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, at first read, I thought they were saying they had resurrected the SATELLITE.

    2. Re:It's a radio telescope by rally2xs · · Score: 2

      Well, I dunno... the dish has mechanical parts that are 40 years old. What condition were they in? Did they need to replace any motors or bearings or control electricals or build new interfaces to old obsolete ones? Did they have to do anti-corrosion measures, maybe even paint the thing? It may have been quite a project. I'm not clicking no links that people have deemed to be a "hack attack" so am not about to read the original article.

  6. as much fuel as it needs.. by mrthoughtful · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a dish - so it uses electricity from the grid.

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  7. Ah yes, Fort Monmouth by Muad'Dave · · Score: 1

    I remember seeing that dish when I worked at Concurrent Computer in nearby Oceanport. I also volunteered at Ft. Monmouth during the 1st Gulf war operating their Army MARS station AAR2USI providing comms between deployed soldiers and their families stateside.

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    1. Re:Ah yes, Fort Monmouth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No. It's not located at Fort Monmouth. It's located at Evans Area (which was once called Camp Evans).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Evans_Historic_District

    2. Re:Ah yes, Fort Monmouth by Switchdog · · Score: 1

      I also volunteered at Ft. Monmouth during the 1st Gulf war operating their Army MARS station AAR2USI providing comms between deployed soldiers and their families stateside.

      When Fort Monmouth shut down, the MARS station moved to Camp Evans. It's currently located in Building 9116, adjacent to the TLM-18

  8. 1420 what by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is that 1420 MHz or 420 KHz (0.4 MHz, as the text reads). If it's 1420 KHz, remind me not to buy an AM station on 1420.
    Hope this posts, lately none of mine get thru, I don't remember my user info to log in.

    1. Re:1420 what by lowen · · Score: 1

      Megahertz. We have dishes here that can receive that band, although our two 26 meter dishes (almost as old as the TIROS dish) are equipped as an interferometer on 2.4GHz and 8.5GHz.

    2. Re:1420 what by mbone · · Score: 1

      The Hydrogen line is at 1420 MHz (AKA 21 cm). That long wavelength is why this dish can be made of high tech chicken wire, instead of having a solid surface.

    3. Re:1420 what by rally2xs · · Score: 1

      A dish at "0.4 Mhz" wouldn't be effective. Has to be Mhz. Don't know how to relate the number "0.4 Mhz" with "1420 Mhz." 0.4 meters would be 1000 Mhz. Who the H wrote that gibberish, anyway?

    4. Re:1420 what by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's just a subtle reminder that this is not a tech website.

  9. 420 you say? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    awww yeah!

  10. Other old tech by Peter+Simpson · · Score: 2

    Occasioned by a weekend trip to the (bitingly frigid cold) Sunday River ski area this past weekend, I learned that TELSTAR 1 is still happily orbiting the earth. The US ground terminal was in Andover, Maine, not too far from Sunday River. It's now just a few equipment shelters and some dishes, but back in the day, there was a huge horn antenna inside a radome. The regional high school is named Telstar. I wonder if the students (or the administration, for that matter) realize the history behind the name...

  11. No, it started life as a TLM-18 Antenna.... by Switchdog · · Score: 1

    Well, I dunno... the dish has mechanical parts that are 40 years old. What condition were they in? Did they need to replace any motors or bearings or control electricals or build new interfaces to old obsolete ones? Did they have to do anti-corrosion measures, maybe even paint the thing? It may have been quite a project.

    Yes, parts had to be replaced and rebuilt. The drives were replaced, the elevation assembly was re-manufactured, feeds were fabricated (one is recycled from another project), and, yes, it was painted.

    Let's not ignore the highly effective job the Army did in de-militarizing the TLM-18. They removed or rendered inoperable the drive controls, pinned the antenna to prevent motion (required a cutting torch to free the mechanism) removed the control console, and striped off the feeds and feed lines. Think Lawn Ornament.....

    From the tech perspective -The software and receiver are open source, the storage servers are all Linux. It's also crowd funded and has not accepted any government money.