NJ Museum Revives TIROS Satellite Dish After 40 Years

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.

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Tiros: first global weather photo

[mrthoughtful]

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...