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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.

4 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. 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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  2. 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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  3. 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.

  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.