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.

Comments

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...

Re: Tiros: first global weather photo

[mrthoughtful]

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

Re: Tiros: first global weather photo

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's a radio telescope

[mbone]

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.

Re:It's a radio telescope

[rally2xs]

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.

as much fuel as it needs..

[mrthoughtful]

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

Re:how much fuel is left?

[mbone]

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.

Re:A lack of details for this technical audience

[HughPickens.com]

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.

Other old tech

[Peter Simpson]

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...