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The Amateur Telescope Maker’s Page

AT a cash outlay of $300, boys at a Hawaiian school built a 20-inch reflecting telescope which has been valued at $20,000. It is said to be one of the largest telescopes in the Pacific area. With the exception of the grinding of the mirror, all the work was done by the students of the Kamehameha school, a private grammar school named after Hawaii’s greatest king. The f-6 mirror was donated by a government employee who ground it himself, taking six months for the job.

The scope is of all-steel construction and weighs 3,000 pounds. The mirror alone weighs 125 pounds. The mounting is German-type equatorial. At present it is manually operated but the ambitious young astronomers are planning to add a clock mechanism.

A good deal of the material used in the construction consists of spare parts and pieces found lying around the Kamehameha machine shop, according to Ardean Sveum, shop instructor, who directed work on the project. An observatory site has been selected and plans are proceeding for the early construction of a permanent building near the school.

Telescope Mirror Grinding Tool

Many an amateur astronomer has found himself in the position of owning a glass or pyrex disk suitable for fashioning into a telescope mirror but without a suitable tool. A tool, of course, can be purchased from one of the numerous telescope supply houses. However, if the mirror is a large one, this is expensive, or if the disk is not of a standard diameter, it might not be possible to find a suitable tool. By following the procedure outlined, a tool can be made for any size disk, inexpensively, and with very little effort.

You’ll need a number of the small hexagonal tiles used for bathroom floors and a matrix. The matrix can be cement or any plaster-type material that sets hard. The tool illustrated was made of dental stone, a powder used in dental work to make casts for bridges or plates. This material is readily available at any dental supply house, is inexpensive, and sets extremely hard. This tool is 8-in. in diameter and 1-1/2 in. thick. It required three pounds of dental stone and 42 tiles.

The first step is to fashion a stiff collar around the circumference of the disk. Cut strips of paper, newspaper will do, somewhat longer than the circumference of the disk and 1/4 in. wider than the thickness of the disk plus the thickness of the desired tool. Place these strips around the disk and secure the end with masking tape, Scotch tape or string.

Place as many of the bathroom tiles on the surface of the disk and within the surrounding paper collar as will fit. Edges of the outer tiles should touch the collar. Place the tiles close together so that points of tiles touch tile edges, but try to minimize the number of edges touching edges as this decreases the tile area secured by the matrix.

Mix the matrix material with cold water until it is about the consistency of thick cream. Be sure it is mixed thoroughly so that no lumps of dry powder are left to weaken the tool. Carefully spoon the mixture onto the tiles so as to avoid disarranging the pattern. Then, when the tiles are covered, pour out the rest of the mixture to within 1/4 inch of the top of the collar.

Allow ample time for setting; at least one-half hour if using dental stone. Slide the cast from the mirror (used as a guide) and strip off the paper collar.

Allow the tool to set overnight, then smooth off the rough or raised edges of matrix material, using a fine file. Be careful not to file tile edges lest they be damaged. After the first few minutes of using the tool to rough grind the mirror, the surface of the tool will have smoothed off even with the inset tiles. • —R. W. Ferguson

I’m a little confused about calling the object a star. N.G.C 4800 is actually a galaxy. Hubble was the one who proved, in the early 1920′s that these distant objects were outside the Milky Way and were in fact galaxies. Since they also refer to it as a nebula (which was sort of a catch-all term for blurry stellar objects at the time) I’m going to guess that it was just the reporter who decided it was a star.

I don’t know enough about solar spectra to be sure, but it seems like you wouldn’t be able to make a direct comparison of the spectra from a whole galaxy to that of one star. Incidentally N.G.C 4800 is actually 97.14 million light years away not the 50 million the article states.

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Photographs STAR Moving 4800 MILES A SECOND

Sitting with his eye glued to a telescopic camera for 45 hours, M. L. Humason, Mt. Wilson astronomer, has succeeded in setting a record for long distance photographs. The nebula on which he trained his camera is 50,000,000 light years away from the earth.

FOR 45 hours in total darkness, Milton L. Humason, member of the astronomical staff at the Mt. Wilson observatory at Pasadena, California, trained the world’s largest telescope toward a far distant point in the heavens and obtained a photograph of a nebula 50,000,000 light years away from the earth—a total of 300 quintillion miles.

While the actual picture of the nebula shows it to be only a pin point among other and less distant stars, what Mr. Humason actually pictured was one of the brightest nebulae in the heavens.

Due to the distance, the amount of light which reached his photographic plate from this nebula is so faint that ordinary telescopes cannot photograph its spectrum. Even the 100-inch telescope had to be held on it all night every night for a week before the inflowing waves of light could be gathered together in the world’s largest reflector and funnelled into an image strong enough to record the spectrum on a photographic plate.

While the nebula has no name, it is known as N. G. C. 4860, which merely means that it is number 4860 in the Mt. Wilson new general catalogue.

Mr. Humason worked in total darkness, because light from any other source than the object would have spoiled the picture. He pointed the telescope toward the object and a driving clock held it in the proper position despite the earth’s rotation. Without the driving clock the telescope would have moved with Mt. Wilson out of alignment.

While the driving clock is as accurate as clock works can be made, Mr. Humason kept his eyes constantly on the slit through which the focused light passes to the prisms and the camera, and corrected any wanderings of the image.

“The light entered the barrel of the telescope striking the 100-inch reflector at the lower end and was reflected back to a smaller mirror at the top,” Mr. Humason explains.

“This reflected the light down the tube again, bringing it to a focus at a slit under the eyes of the observer. Passing through the slit the focused light would strike a series of prisms which broke it into colors, and that is the spectrum I photographed. Falling for a long time on a sensitive photographic plate, even this very faint light finally made an impression.”

The spectrum of the nebulae, when compared with the spectrum of the sun, revealed that the object is moving away from the earth at a speed of 4800 miles a second.

“Interpreting this in the established way,” says Mr. Humason, “it would look as if the whole universe were exploding, scattering into space, entire nebulae flying away faster than shells from a cannon, but I don’t believe the universe is blowing up.”

While photographing this rapidly receding nebulae, Mr. Humason had to control the focus and the comparison spectrum, keep the temperature of the spectrograph exactly right throughout the night. Sitting in total darkness with his eyes on a slit of dim light little larger than a pin head, he worked levers and pushed buttons for seven nights without moving the photographic plate or losing sight of the faintly luminous spot in the sky. Here Mr. Humason brought romance of the heavens down to earth.

Mr. Humason and his fellow astronomers have been unable to determine whether the huge velocity—4800 miles a second —is real, or whether the indication comes from a slowing down of the light waves due to distortion in space, or to forces acting on the waves during their long journey to earth.

By the taking of this long distance photograph and other experiments at Mt. Wilson, the astronomers are attempting to test Einstein’s contention that the entire universe of space and time are curved. They are attempting to test it not mathematically, but by actual observation.

Mr. Humason’s long distance photograph goes to the very heart of the problem. The light by which the photograph was taken comes from the remotest region of the universe. It is not local light, not light radiated from within our own galaxy. It originates far outside.

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Signals from the Stars

EVER since it was first indicated that the static present in the output of radio receivers was due in part to physical disturbances on the sun a new field of research has attracted popular scientific interest. It is radio astronomy, whose equipment and observers listen not to man made responses, but instead to continuous “static” from the stars. That cosmic radio noise exists was realized as far back as 1931. Early records proved it to be most intense when receivers probed toward the Milky Way, or lengthwise through our enormous watch-shaped galaxy. By contrast, the sun emits very weak signals, principally from its chromosphere and corona, although at longer wavelengths these show tremendous variations up to several thousand per cent. It is easy to imagine the annihilating results such changes would have on the earth were they at the visible portion of the spectrum. Yet in terms of total solar radiant energy, the effect of radio waves is insignificant.

Radio astronomy differs from the visual in two principal ways. First, of course, is the fact that we are studying unseen phenomena—radiation at wavelengths much longer than that detectable by the eye. And, second, instead of lens systems and photographic plates, very sensitive radio receivers teamed with high resolution antennas are used to make the observations. Current television stations operate from 1.39 to 1.75, and 3.4 to 5.5 meters (the latter, channels 2 to 6). The FM radio band lies in between, covering 2.8 to 3.4 m. But standard AM broadcasting transmits from 180 up to 550 meters. For example, WNBC New York, at 660 kilocycles on the dial, has successive wave crests separated by approximately 1,500 feet, nearly as high as the Empire State Building, all racing toward listeners with the speed of light. Up to the present time radio astronomy investigations have been confined to measurements at wavelengths between 3 mm. and 20 meters. At the shortest wavelength the successive wave crests are separated in space by about twice the thickness of a penny.

The instruments used for celestial microwave study, while resembling reflector type telescopes in appearance, differ considerably in operation. Moreover, weather clouds which prevent optical work will not appreciably interfere with the collection of stellar radio data. This was vividly demonstrated at Attu, Alaska, on September 12, 1950, when the Naval Research Laboratory’s expedition successfully recorded a total eclipse of the sun during a rainstorm. But in resolving power, radio telescopes cannot equal conventional ones because of the much longer wavelengths used.

Since radio astronomy itself is a comparatively new field, where the tools and observing techniques are still undergoing modification, definite conclusions regarding the cause of noises heard from out in space would be premature. Interesting is the fact that none of the brighter stars we see in our sky contributes much in the range of radio waves.

Just as advances in terrestrial nuclear _ physics have explained the heat and behavior of stars, they also aid scientists in formulating theories on the origin of cosmic rays. Some years ago, it appeared plausible that loose electrons in interstellar space sent out radiations as they sped past protons or other heavier particles. The more modern idea, however, proposes that some unusual stars of lower than naked eye luminosity and temperature may be responsible. Stronger emissions from the summer constellation of Sagittarius, toward the center of our galaxy, suggests a concentration there.

Exploration of the universe has thus been vastly expanded with the growth of radio astronomical apparatus permitting study of celestial radiation at frequencies never before investigated. Who can predict what great and hitherto “invisible” objects will be discovered?

—P. A. Leavens

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Number One Rocket Man

A Silhouette of the Shy Massachusetts Physicist Who Pioneered in Rocket Research . . . Much to His Distress He Broke into the Noisier Newspapers

By G. EDWARD PENDRAY
Past President, the American Rocket Society
Editor of Astronautics

ON a flat, dry plain, 18 miles north of Roswell, New Mexico, rises a 60-foot tower of steel that has roused more curiosity, and has probably had a greater influence on the future of the world, than any other feature of all New Mexico’s arresting landscape.

From this tower, at irregular intervals, a Massachusetts physicist and his assistants send roaring into the skies certain gleaming, cigar-shaped projectiles of metal, powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen, and landed by parachutes.

The physicist is Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard, a bald, spare, pleasant man who will be 56 years old next October 5 (1938). Rocket experimenters the world over recognize him as their Number One man. Not only has he made more contributions to the new field of rocket engineering than any other one individual, but it was Dr. Goddard who launched modern rocket research with his clear presentation of the possibilities of rockets, both their limitations and advantages, 19 years ago. His publication, modestly entitled “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1919.

DR. GODDARD at that time had already been a rocket experimenter for nearly ten years. His first trials were made during some studies of the upper atmosphere while he was an instructor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in 1909. Baffled by the uncertainty and limitations of sounding balloons, he imagined that by building some kind of huge skyrocket he could shoot self-recording instruments high into the stratosphere and bring back information of value to science.

This idea of reaching high altitudes with rockets was by no means new with Dr. Goddard. In fact, we are told that a certain Chinese mandarin in the 13th Century sought to lift himself to the moon by fastening rockets to the legs of his chair. Cyrano de Bergerac, the novelist, wrote a story 300 years ago in which the hero transported himself by rocket power. Warmen saw in rockets a potential carrier of explosives centuries ago, and in the Napoleonic wars rocket brigades blossomed in Europe. In the siege of Boulogne, the English succeeded in setting the town afire with rockets designed by Sir William Congreve.

But those early efforts were rule-of-thumb procedures, and really came to little. What Dr. Goddard proposed, 29 years ago, was to apply the methods of modern engineering to the construction of rockets. He perceived that several diverse and complicated problems would have to be tackled, seriatim: (1) the fuel, (2) the materials, (3) the methods of feeding the fuels, (4) the aerodynamic design, (5) control in flight, (6) the further unknowns.

For the rocket, though a seemingly simple device, is really very complicated. It works by recoil—by application of the ancient principle that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The action is produced by rapid combustion and simultaneous ejection of gas at high velocity. The reaction occurs in the body of the rocket, which flies at an accelerated rate in the direction opposite that of the ejected gases.

Had Dr. Goddard been a less practical man he would have been content to write an article about the idea, or give a lecture on it, and sit back to await the development at someone else’s hands.

But it happened that he was of the sort who undertake to test their notions before they talk about them. The only successful examples of rockets in his day were skyrockets and life-saving rockets— both powered by modified gunpowder. Beginning at this point, Dr. Goddard tested powder fuel rockets. As new teaching appointments took him to Princeton, and then to Clark University, the idea went with him.

Talk of rockets is so commonplace today—such success has attended the efforts of experimenters—that rocketry is almost respectable. But in the old days of 1914 and earlier, few sane engineers spoke of them except humorously, and physicists who entertained the idea of rocket transportation must have been as rare as one-armed flute players. Nevertheless, Dr. Goddard succeeded, one by one, in convincing his colleagues. In 1914, plugging away on his own, he took out two basic patents on rockets, pertaining to combustion chambers and nozzles. A short time later he talked the problem of rocketry through with Dr. Charles G. Abbot, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. So convincing was his argument that the conservative old Institution agreed to grant him modest funds for a series of experiments. In the tests that followed, Dr. Goddard demonstrated that rockets really need no air to push against, and that they are capable of development. He also proved that gunpowder-like fuels must be abandoned in favor of more powerful, more easily controlled kinds, probably liquefied gases.

Thus started what rocket engineers now refer to as the era of “liquid-fuel” rockets—the real beginning of scientific rocketry. Simple calculations show that the most powerful release of energy, pound for pound, occurs during the combustion of carbon or hydrogen with oxy- gen. The problem was to produce this combustion at the right time, in the right place, and under the right conditions.

After some preliminary trials, Dr. Goddard decided that the best fuel would be a chemical combination of hydrogen and carbon, as in gasoline, and that oxygen could most conveniently be supplied in the pure form, liquefied. These early tests were carried on very secretly near Auburn, Massachusetts, and apparently were the first “proving-stand”‘ experiments with liquid-fuel rocket motors —primitive, to be sure, but they set the foundation upon which a great deal of experimental work has since been built. Dr. Goddard tried out liquid oxygen and various members of the hydro-carbon series, including gasoline, kerosene, liquid propane, also ether. He finally discarded the others and settled on gasoline and oxygen. Virtually all of his experiments since have been made with these.

By 1923 he felt ready to try an actual liquid-fuel rocket. On November 1 of that year he completed and tried out a small one on his proving-stand, tying it down so it couldn’t fly. It seemed promising, but wasn’t good enough. For one thing, there was the problem of getting the fuels from the tanks into the combustion chamber fast enough. He had used small pumps on the rocket, but pumps are slow, heavy, and troublesome.

IT took two more years to overcome that problem. In December, 1925, he completed and tested a second liquid-fuel rocket in which the fuels were forced into the chamber by the pressure of an inert gas, nitrogen. This method worked well, but still the experimenter cautiously denied himself the experience of turning it loose to see it fly.

That pleasure was reserved until three months later, when on March 16, 1926, at Auburn, he put an improved liquid-fuel rocket into his improvised launching rack and let her go. So far as I have been able to find evidence, this was the first actual flight of a liquid-fuel rocket in this country or anywhere in the world. It was in no sense a public shot. The only witnesses were Dr. Goddard and a couple of helpers. The experimenter timed it with a stop watch and later reported that it fired for two and a half seconds, during which time it flew 184 feet, “making the speed along the trajectory about 60 miles an hour.”

A queer-looking rocket it was, too, compared with the sleek projectiles Dr. Goddard’s shop in New Mexico now turns out. The fuel tanks were slender tubes, placed one behind the other. The motor, consisting of the combustion chamber and its exhaust nozzle, was well ahead, supported on spidery arms which also carried the fuel lines. The whole contrivance was about ten feet long, but only about half of this length was actual rocket; the rest was the harness that joined the motor to the tanks. Pressure to force the fuels into the combustion chamber was furnished by an outside pressure tank and, after launching, by an alcohol heater carried on the rocket.

The idea of putting the motor ahead of the tanks was the mistaken one that this method of “pulling” the rocket, instead of pushing it, would make it fly better. In practice it did nothing of the kind; it only added to the difficulties of construction. Dr. Goddard abandoned the design at once in favor of rockets with the motor at the rear. Between 1926 and 1929 he shot a number of these, with varying success.

And then, quite unexpectedly, Dr. Goddard broke into the newspapers— much to his distress. Naturally reserved and somewhat uncommunicative, he had early discovered what most rocket experimenters find out sooner or later— that next to an injurious explosion, publicity is the worst possible disaster. (Most newspaper writers still seem to believe that every rocket is aimed at the moon.) It was his shot of July 17, 1929, at Auburn, that brought Dr. Goddard this great and unexpected burst of notoriety. The rocket was a fairly large one, carrying a small barometer and a camera. Being large enough to carry instruments, it also made a great deal of noise. Neighbors telephoned the police that an airplane had crashed in flames. A few ex- cited Auburnites were certain a meteor had fallen. When fire and police departments arrived, they found only a rocket experimenter, examining the remains of his rocket, pleased at the notable fact that his instrument, shot several hundred feet heavenward, had parachuted gently back from the flight and landed intact.

But the simple facts were by no means enough for the newspapers. Some, of course, had sensible stories, but they were in the minority. It was widely reported that he had shot a rocket to the moon, but had failed, that his rocket had exploded, that it had contained tons of explosive, that his intentions were to fly to Mars.

Fortunately the flurry was short-lived. Also, it had some good results, for it is said that as a result of the publicity Col. Charles A. Lindbergh first became interested in Dr. Goddard and his rockets. At any rate, it was in 1929 that the flyer brought rocketry to the attention of the late Daniel Guggenheim. The result was a grant that made possible the present establishment in New Mexico, under conditions that many experimenters consider ideal for rocket research.

About three miles north of Roswell, a shop 30 by 55 feet was erected, and near it a 20-foot tower built for proving-stand tests of motors and rockets. Fifteen miles farther north, on the plains, stands the 60-foot launching tower from which actual rocket shots are made. The region thereabout lias an altitude of about 3500 feet—enough to reduce noticeably the resistance of the air to rapid flight, as compared with the denser air at sea level. The country is level and open. There is space for high experimental flights without much danger of the rocket landing on an indignant bystander.

Gasoline and liquid oxygen, mixed, form a peculiarly violent detonator, yielding about five times as much energy pound for pound as TNT. Dr. Goddard has taken what may seem like extreme precautions against accident and injury. At the launching tower, all experiments are managed by remote control. The operator and observers are stationed 1000 feet away, in a shelter protected by sand bags on the roof. The observer whose task it is to clock the rocket flight, and who therefore cannot conveniently work from a shelter, is stationed 3000 feet from the tower. For close observations, to watch the firing, launching, and so on, there is a concrete dugout 50 feet from the launching tower. The observer looks through four-inch peepholes in a tilted slab of concrete three inches thick.

THE rocket motor used by Dr. Goddard in his New Mexico shots is 5% inches in diameter and weighs five pounds. It usually fires about 20 seconds, and delivers a maximum thrust of 289 pounds. Such a motor can hoist a real projectile into the air, and such, indeed, have been the projectiles that Dr. Goddard has been attaching to them. His first New Mexico rocket was shot on December 30, 1930. It was 11 feet long and weighed 33.5 pounds without fuel. It reached an altitude of 2000 feet, and a maximum speed of 500 miles an hour.

This was only the beginning. Heavier, more powerful rockets were to come. In August, 1934, the experimenter shot a pendulum-controlled rocket that made an altitude of 1000 feet, then turned horizontally for 11,000 feet, landing a little over two miles from the launching tower. At one point its velocity touched 700 miles an hour.

In none of these shots was altitude or speed the chief object. The experimenter, having tentatively solved, in order, the problems of fuel, material, methods of feeding the fuel, and aerodynamic design, was by now working on the hardest knot of all—control. Specifically, he was trying to build a rocket that would be capable of sure, dependable upward flight. After 25 years of experiment his eyes were still on the stratosphere.

Now there may be some trick of aerodynamics or design that will guarantee vertical flight without special control mechanisms and the extra complications they entail. Many rocket experimenters hope so, but to date they haven’t discovered it. After his early experiences with cantankerous projectiles, whishing through the air at express speed but fol- lowing whimsical air-paths all their own, Dr. Goddard decided that a gyroscopically-operated control mechanism would have to be devised.

In the beginning he tried some other devices, notably the pendulum, but these depend on gravity and are affected by the course and acceleration of the rocket. The gyroscope, however, holds its position with relation to space, regard- less of the torque or acceleration of the projectile carrying it.

The main problem was to construct a sensitive servo-mechanism that would steer the rocket back on course without disturbing the gyro. Dr. Goddard’s idea was to have small vanes pushed into the path of the exhaust gases in such a manner as to deflect the flight. In his first trial the system didn’t work as well as expected. The performance led the physicist to suspect that the vanes were too small, and he resolved later to try again with larger ones.

The improved system worked better. The vanes, driven by gas pressure into the rocket exhaust stream, were set to apply controlling force when the axis of the projectile deviated as much as 10 degrees from the vertical. The finest shot so far reported with this system reached an altitude of 7500 feet. Rising slowly from the launching tower, the rocket undulated from side to side as the gyro-control continually corrected the course. “The first few hundred feet of the flight,” reported the experimenter, “reminded one of a fish swimming in a vertical direction.” After the rocket had gained more speed, the curves smoothed out.

Such a flight, of course, is not ideal. Much power is lost in useless undulations. But flight control had at least been started, and the physicist of Worcester could check off one more step in the series of conquests leading to the de- velopment of the rocket. Still before him are those problems classified as “the further unknowns.” One of them is the problem of reducing the weight of the rocket, for every extra ounce requires extra fuel to lift it, and extra fuel to lift the extra fuel, ad infinitum. There are no filling stations on the route to extreme altitudes. The rocket must start with a full tank, and one filling is all it can expect.

Other problems are those of improving the efficiency of the rocket motor, which is still far from that which is theoretically expected; improving the aerodynamic design for flight at super-sonic velocities; smoother control; and a surer technique for releasing the parachute or other landing apparatus at the exact top of the flight.

IN justice it should be said that Dr.

Goddard is no longer alone in the colossal task of mastering these difficulties. All over the world, since 1928. rocket societies and rocket experimenters have sprung up, some to make a few tests and drop the subject, others to plow on toward the goal as doggedly as does Dr. Goddard himself. In this country there are at least 20 other active experimenters, and a rocket society that numbers nearly 300 members. In England an experimental group has about 50 members. There are rocket experimenters in Austria, Russia, France, Japan, New Zealand, Canada. The American Rocket Society has an active affiliate at Yale University. Other American universities are considering the establishment of affiliate groups of experimenters among their engineering students and faculties. California experimenters cross the continent to report their work in New York before the Institute of Aeronautical Engineers.

Dr. Goddard’s work thus may have opened a new era in transportation, for rockets can do more than explore the upper atmosphere. They ultimately may carry mail and goods—and possibly even passengers—with speed rivaling that of the telegraph; usher in an epoch of swift communication more spectacular than that brought by the telephone and airplane; alter once more the complexion of civilization as only basic inventions can alter it.

It was Col. Lindbergh who, in a letter recently to the President of Clark University, put the matter most directly: “The rocket is now in that most interesting period of discovery where the shore lines are unplotted and the future limited only by imagination. We cannot state what speeds or ranges the rocket may attain, but it is not restricted by the rotation of an engine or by dependence on the atmosphere.

“As the airplane gave man freedom from the earth, the rocket offers him freedom from the air.”

Your Moon Room’s Waiting

IF YOU’RE considering joining the ranks of early Moon residents, you’ll be glad to know a prototype apartment already has been prepared for you.
Dr. I. M. Levitt, director of Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, suggests your rockets, after they’ve gotten you to the Moon, should be sliced into 7-ft. sections. Standing on their ends, the sections will provide individual rooms.

Because of the surface temperature range — nearly hot enough in the sunlight to boil water, yet several hundred degrees colder in the shade—Dr. Levitt believes man’s living on the Moon will have to begin in giant under-surface caves. He suggests lining a cave with a giant balloon, inflated with an Earth-like atmosphere. Astronauts, he says, will venture out in space suits to retrieve the rocket sections and build individual Moon room quarters.

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Beating the Celestial Strip-Tease

by Bill Williams

THE Eskimos call them “the dancing souls of the dead.” The ancient Norsemen said they were Valkyries carrying warriors to Valhalla. Modem scientists call them a “celestial strip-tease.” But communication engineers call the Northern Lights a plain pain in the neck.

The Northern Lights—the Aurora Borealis —have been the subject of superstition and folk-lore for ages. There have been tales as fabulous as the eerie lights themselves—of immense radium mines in the Arctic that glow at night, of frigid goddesses of the glacial ice, of vast fires that bum beyond the rim of the earth.

So long as the ghostly Gay White Way of the Heavens did nothing more to disturb us than frighten a few superstitious people, scientists paid no particular attention to them.

But since the advent of radio and long-range telegraphic and cable circuits, it has been noted that the Northern Lights are always associated with tremendous magnetic storms which play havoc with communications systems. And this discovery has spurred our scientists to a closer study of the stratospheric fireworks, until, now, we are beginning to learn something other than myth about them..

A few years ago, a magnetic storm accompanied by an unusual display of Northern Lights usually meant a complete breakdown of radio and telegraphic communication for several hours. Today, due to new facts which study of the phenomena have yielded and new methods of “dodging” electronic pyrotechnics developed by engineers, an outburst of the Aurora is not nearly so serious a threat to the vital flow of intelligence among humans.

The terrific display of Northern Lights and its accompanying magnetic storm on September 18 of this year—the most intense ever recorded in the United States—found communications engineers prepared. For the first time during such a storm, as a result, they were able to maintain radio communications, even with Europe. The tricks they used in keeping information channels open were almost as interesting as the latest explanations of the phenomenon of Aurora.

In the first place, it should be made plain that the Aurora and the magnetic storms on the earth’s surface are merely related phenomena, and not the same thing. Both, however, are due to gigantic exploding “spots” which show up on the face of the sun.

Only this year have scientists been able to make the definite assertion that both the Northern Lights and the terrestial magnetic storms are certainly due to sunspots. In the past, they have noted the relationship between these phenomena, but have not been sure that this relationship was not merely coincidental. This year, however, H. W. Wells of the Department of Terrestial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institute, was able to predict accurately the September 18 display several days ahead of time.

Before the September 18 Aurora, also, motion pictures were made of one of the sun’s spots for the first time, according to the report of Dr. Edison Pettit of the Mount Wilson Ob- servatory, using a new type of instrument known as an interference polarizing monochromator. The sunspot was shown to be a solar tornado of fiery gas, whirling on the surface of the sun at a speed of 120,000 miles per hour.

When first seen, the tornado was 8,000 miles wide at its base and 38,000 miles high! A smoke-like column projecting from its top reached an elevation of 68,000 miles, and during the course of observation a knot of gas broke away from the top and was hurled upward at a speed of 130,000 miles per hour!

But this “movie actor sunspot” was a baby compared to many sun-spots!

In the unimaginable heat of these fiery cyclones of the sun, hydrogen and helium atoms are being constantly broken up and reformed, and in the process great waves of solar radiation are shot out into space.

It has now been definitely determined that ordinary solar radiation—sunlight, as we know it, from the infra-reds through the ultra-violets— increases measurably during periods of sunspot activity. But also, observations by Dr. Harlan T. Stetson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have definitely shown that sunspots produce another radiation, different from sunlight, in the form of relatively slow-moving electrically charged particles, somewhat akin to electrons and protons.

Whereas light travels at a speed of 186,324 miles per second, these electrically charged particles travel at a speed of only 1,200 miles per second, approximately. These mysterious electrical “shots” are about 150 times slower than light.

Light, at its terrific speed shoots down upon the earth without being appreciably affected by the earth’s magnetic field.

But the sunspot’s slower electrically charged particles, traveling only about 1,200 miles a second, are seized upon by the earth’s magnetic field as they enter the outer atmosphere, and are drawn toward the magnetic poles.

Now, these slow-moving streams of electrical particles are what cause the Aurora, as we shall explain in a moment. Their attraction to the magnetic poles, due to their slowness, is the reason why the Aurora is seen principally in far northern latitudes. At times of great sunspot activity, more of these electrical particles are produced and they tend to “pile up” and back down into the lower latitudes. The September 18 Aurora was seen as far south as Georgia and Southern California.

Now for the manner in which these mysterious energy-bombardments from the sun cause the Northern Lights to light: The Norwegian geophysicist, Vegard, has recently explained that, in the simplest terms, the Northern Lights are lit in very much the same manner that one of our modern neon advertising signs is made to glow!

A neon sign is a sealed tube containing neon gas at low pressure, with an electric filament introduced. When the electricity is turned on, the filament shoots off electrons and the electrons bombard the gas. Outer electrons are stripped from the gas atoms by this bombardment, trans- forming the gas into an unbalanced energy-state which causes it to glow. Neon produces a red color. But scientists can reproduce all the eerie colors of the Northern Lights in the laboratory by bombarding various types of gases. Nitrogen glows green; mercury vapor, a blue-green; argon, a pink shade, and so on.

Scientists have now proven to their own satisfaction that this is exactly what happens in the upper areas of the atmosphere when the gases of the atmosphere, at low pressure, are bombarded by the electrified particles shot off from sun-spots. The Aurora is a celestial “strip-tease,” in which energy-particles from the sun strip electrons from the gas atoms of the super-stratosphere and cause them to luminesce.

They have even reproduced exactly the mysterious yellowish-green which is characteristic of the Aurora. This color, due to a single wave-length no where else duplicated in nature, puzzled researchers for a generation, until Sir John McLennan of the University of Toronto demonstrated in the laboratory that it is given off by atomic oxygen in a peculiar state of excitation, and then only when mixed with some of the other gases normally found in the atmosphere—argon, neon, helium and nitrogen.

The significance of this green line light is due not alone to its presence in the Aurora. It is also the most conspicuous light-line found in the luminescence of the night sky which is present all over the earth every night. On a clear, moonless night, sky-light is equivalent to that of a 25-candlepower lamp about 300 meters away. It has been found that the stars contribute approximately one-fourth of this light, and the balance is due to luminescence.

Experiments done by Stormer almost complete man’s knowledge of the Aurora. Stormer, in recent tests, determined that the Aurora occurs not at great distances above the earth, as was originally believed, but in that section of the atmosphere ranging from 50 to 80 miles from the earth’s surface. He measured the Aurora by photographing the phenomenon against a background of stars and then calculated by triangulation.

Dr. Stetson, of M. I. T., explained recently that there is a regular sequence of magnetic phenomena. First, sunspots are observed. There is a lag of about a day, and then the Aurora appears in the night sky. At about the same time, short- wave radio transmission is affected—in some cases completely blanketed out. Then, about a day later, standard-broadcast waves are affected.

In some instances, telegraphic communications are blanketed out, and the news teletypes in newspaper offices, and tickers in brokerage offices cease to function or bring in nothing but garbled messages.

During the September 18 storm, radio and telegraphic engineers whipped the sunspots for the first time in history.

By experimentation, they had learned that only east-west messages, or those running counter to the south-north magnetic field, are affected by these magnetic outbursts. They had also learned, as outlined above, that shortwave and standard broadcast frequencies are affected at different times during a magnetic storm.

RCA beat the magnetic waves on their foreign broadcasts by sending their messages “around the elbow.” They fired their radio messages south from New York to Buenos Aires, where it was automatically made to “turn the elbow” and was relayed to London, thereby dodging the storm by a 12,000-mile north-south detour. The messages made no stop in the Argentine and were flashed directly across the South and North Atlantic to out-trick nature’s bombardment.

Success was also achieved for transoceanic messages by alternating between long wave and short wave broadcast senders. The storm lasted for 25 hours, according to RCA engineers, but at no time was service cut off.

From the first observations recorded by literate men, the sublime display of the Northern Lights has stirred practical observers to lyrical ecstasies, and the scientific explanation detracts little from the enthusiasm.

One of the best descriptions is quoted from a Norse manuscript of the year 1250: “It appears like a flame of strong fire seen from afar. Pointed shafts of unequal and very variable size dart upwards into the air, so that now the one and now the other is the higher, and the light is floating in a shining blaze. So long as these rays are highest and brightest, this sparkling fire gives so much light that, out of doors, one can find one’s way about and even hunt. In houses with windows it is light enough for men to see each other’s faces.

“But this light is so variable that it sometimes seems to grow obscure, as if a dark smoke or thick fog is breathed on it, and soon the light seems to be stifled in this smoke. As night ends and dawn approaches the light begins to pale, and disappears when day breaks. Some people maintain that this light is a reflection of the fire which surrounds the seas of the north and south. Others say it is the reflection of the sun when it is below the horizon. For my part I think it is produced by the ice which radiates at night the light which it has absorbed from tlie day’s sunshine.”

Dr. Irving Krick, noted meteorologist, recently announced that he had determined a definite cycle of weather behavior which corresponds to the known 11-year cycle of sun-spot activity, which may make possible long distance weather forecasting hitherto undreamed of. The Harvard School of Business has released a report showing a direct relationship between solar radiation and the ups and downs of the stock markets. Scientists have found a relationship between sunspot radiation and crimes of violence. It has even been pointed out as significant that both World War I and World War II broke out at periods of maximum sunspot activity.

Science has explained the mystery of what makes the Northern Lights light. Perhaps even greater mysteries of the Northern Lights and their effect upon mankind’s behavior are only now opening up.

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The Next Frontier?

Shape of things to come? Even as Apollo and orbiting Skylab recede into history, American scientists consider a more awesome enterprise—a permanent colony in space.

By ISAAC ASIMOV Paintings by PIERRE MION

I DID NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND what L-5 was like, on this July day in A.D. 2026, until I no longer saw it from my vantage point in space.

On the shuttle flight I had observed by telescope the torus that we all recognize, much like a bicycle wheel, gleaming in the direct light of the sun and in the light reflected from the large mirror floating free above. The six spokes and the central hub were visible too, of course.

The shuttle craft was built for durability, not comfort, and I welcomed the end of our journey—a three-day flight. As we moved in toward the docking module, L-5 stopped being a torus in space and became a habitat, a world with 10,000 people. The hub is a sphere 130 meters in diameter, which seemed huge when we were immediately above it. The six spokes led out to the torus proper, the nearer edge of which was 765 meters away. What it amounted to in older units of measurement was that L-5 was a little more than 1.1 miles across.

There were the usual complications of docking, establishing an airtight seal, and getting through an air lock. Then I underwent a brief medical examination. Finally George Fenton greeted me. The head of L-5 was a stocky man with a shock of brown hair and a swarthy complexion. He was dressed lightly and loosely, but not exotically. His personal attention, I gathered, was not unusual; a freelance writer for National Geographic was treated with the same courtesy as any arriving visitor.

Hub’s Low Gravity an Aid to Research

“The day will come, sir,” Fenton said, “when there will be colonies large enough to take in the shuttles whole. It will be much easier when that day comes.”

I protested that it had been no trouble and looked about. Somehow I had expected to get into the hub and see a cavernous vista. Instead, I found myself in a corridor very much like that in any large office building back on earth—except for the bars and handholds one requires at low gravity.

“There are no living quarters in the hub,” Fenton said. “There’s a small hospital here for cardiac cases and orthopedic problems. There are also research laboratories. Some of these are biological, studying the effect of low gravity on living systems; some are industrial and engineering….”

“You mean it’s here that you grow crystals and manufacture electronic components?”

Fenton smiled. “No, not here. Not enough room and, besides, we need a vacuum for that. Our manufacturing plants are out in near space, and are attached to the main body of L-5 by transport tubes.

“Of course we are not yet self-supporting. We depend on earth for much of our high technology as well as our culture, education, and medicine. However, we have already become an important part of earth’s computer industry and a source of many of the microminiature circuits it uses.”

“To say nothing of your manufacturing solar-energy stations?”

Fenton shrugged. “That’s an old story. The first solar power station was operative and sent into orbit around earth even before L-5 was entirely habitable.

“We will want to go out to the torus, and the third elevator bank is nearest. Do you mind starting there?”

He took my agreement for granted, for he seized the nearest handhold, pushed off, and went shooting along the corridor. I followed, but with far less expertise. There wasn’t quite the sensation of shooting upward that one gets in the zero gravity of a coasting shuttle. The weak gravity was enough to make the flight seem horizontal but to have me sinking slowly. I caught another handhold and brought myself to a yanking halt. I walked the last few meters, rubbing my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” said Fenton. “I know you’ve had space experience, and I rather thought you were used to this.”

“I am,” I said. “Just not quite enough.”

Elevator Picks Up Speed — Sideways

The elevator door opened, and I stepped into a semicircular chamber about five meters deep and rather more than that across.

Fenton said, “This elevator car fills about one-third of the spoke, and there’s room for another one.”

Fenton hooked an arm around one of the six vertical bars spaced through the car, and I took another, assuming there was some purpose for that.

I said, after a time, “Aren’t we moving rather slowly?”

“Yes, we are. Two reasons. First, the gravity effect gets stronger as we move down, and the body adjusts more easily if the change isn’t too rapid. After all, we go from nearly nothing to full gravity in a matter of just about a kilometer. Second, there is the Coriolis force that results when you move from a region of one sideways speed to another that is much faster or much slower. You know about it?”

I nodded, a little abashed. “I know about it, but I tend to forget.”

One talks about gravity on L-5, but it’s a centrifugal effect and that’s not quite the same thing. The torus makes one revolution per minute. This means that the edge of the hub, which we had just left, sweeps out a circle of about 400 meters in that minute. The outer edge of the torus, making a much larger circle, moves 5,600 meters in that same minute, creating greater centrifugal force—a workable substitute for gravity. The elevator car moving downward is accelerated sideways—the Coriolis force—and I felt myself being pulled backward against the curved wall by my own inertia. I held on to the vertical bar and wished we were moving more slowly still.

Earthlike Vista Stuns a Newcomer

When the elevator came to a halt, I had regained full gravitational effect for the first time since I had left earth. That meant not only the three days spent in actual spaceflight, barring brief acceleration periods, but the two-day period of medical examination and quarantine while in low earth orbit. It was with only a faint nausea, however, that I stepped out, just a little unsteadily, into the sunlight streaming through the long line of windows above.

I stopped and stared. It was not just that the gravity was like that of earth. It was everything else as well. I had stepped into a compact American community with glass and aluminum buildings on every side.

My thoughts were easy to read, for Fenton said, “There are differences. No automobiles.”

“Not many pedestrians, either, I see.” The few that passed, all lightly clothed, greeted Fenton, and he lifted his arm, smiling. The greetings seemed to include me.

“Most of us know each other,” said Fenton.

“L-5 is a world, but it’s also a town of 10,000.

“The torus is divided into six separate sectors, alternating between residential and agricultural. More than half the population lives in this particular sector, so you might say this is our city.

“The next residential area in the direction of rotation has most of our cultural units— theater, movie house, sports areas. The third has our schools and our library.

“Sunlight is filtered and dispersed by a series of mirrors overhead. Without earthly atmosphere, we have to be particularly careful of radiation. We can produce an eight-hour night every 24 hours by tilting the mirrors. It’s part of making L-5 as earthlike as possible. The streets, you may see, curve a bit.”

“Why is that?”

“So that you don’t see to the end of any of them. If they were straight, they would end too soon, and you would have a claustrophobic feeling.”

I was watching the pedestrians. Most were men in early maturity. I said, “Do the women and children stay indoors?”

Fenton said, “No, there just aren’t many. We are still a pioneer community, you know, and our population is as yet unbalanced. Fewer than half of our more or less permanent residents are women. Nevertheless, there are families. We have nearly a thousand youngsters on L-5, some colony-born. My own daughter was born here five years ago.”

Goat-milk Shake and Hare of the Dog

“What do the single people do?” I asked.

“Some stay single. Some go back to earth to try to find a mate. Some stay on earth, and some bring a spouse to L-5. Of course, there are no jobs on L-5 that can’t be done equally well by either sex. Nevertheless, there are still old cultural habits that die hard, and we receive more male applicants than female. But as time goes by, we expect to have a normally distributed population.

“Come, let me take you to one of the sun-decks on top of this building.”

The whole atmosphere changed when we went inside. Now there was the bustle of people coming and going in the corridors. Fenton led me past what was obviously a schoolroom. There were children on L-5. I even saw an infant occasionally, in a thoroughly earthlike baby carriage.

There were shops on the building’s lower floors, small ones, but of considerable variety.

“Do you have department stores?”

“No,” he said. “We find that anything too large tends to dwarf the torus. Psychologically, it is better to work with many small units. Would you like something to eat?”

I wasn’t very hungry, but it seemed polite to have a frankfurter and milk shake. They were dispensed by token-operated machines.

“Did you like it?” asked Fenton.

“Oh, yes,” I said cautiously. (Good enough, but I was used to better on earth.)

“That frankfurter is what we call ‘Hare of the Dog.’ H-A-R-E. It’s made from rabbit meat. We are just establishing beef cattle on L-5 and haven’t slaughtered any yet.”

“And what about the milk shake?”

“Goat’s milk.”

We went up in a crowded elevator. Most of those on it got off at intermediate floors. Two men and a woman, scantily covered, stayed to the end. The area we entered was an unshaded terrace where about a dozen men and women were sunning themselves.

I followed Fenton to a railed edge and looked out over the rooftops.

“We’re about 65 meters up,” he said, “and gravitational pull is only 90 percent that at the surface. That’s not enough to be aware of. But there…,” he pointed outward, “is where you can see that you are not on earth.”

He was right. At that height I could see the curve of the torus from within. There was no horizon in the earthly sense. The line of buildings stretching out below me seemed to—no, did—curve upward. They came to an end and were replaced by greenery (the neighboring agricultural section) that continued the upward curve into a blur.

“Earth is different,” I said.

“I know,” said Fenton, reflectively. “I was born in Memphis; came to L-5 when I was 35.”

“Do you miss earth?”

“Sometimes, but not very often. We try to keep the colony like earth, you see, but actually it’s all moon dust. Almost everything you see was once on the moon. We’ve got L-5 people there right now, several hundred of them, mining moon material and sending it to the foundries in the neighborhood of L-5. We get endless quantities of aluminum, titanium, glass, iron, and oxygen from the lunar crust.

“Then, too, the soil in which we grow our plant life is moon soil, a little modified. In fact, the only raw materials of importance that we must still get from earth are light elements: hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. The imported hydrogen combines with our own oxygen to give us our water supplies. Actually, we import only small quantities since we cycle very tightly. But come, I don’t want you up here too long.”

He said, when we were back in the comparative emptiness of the streets: “The shielding helps keep out cosmic rays, but perhaps not quite efficiently enough. There’s some controversy there. We have enough lunar slag built up outside the walls of the torus to give us safety, but the hub and spokes are less well protected.”

We were walking leisurely, and he said: “L-5 is a transitional world only. It probably has a lifetime of no more than fifty years. At this very moment we of L-5 are engaged in building a second colony, which will be larger and more elaborate than the first. Before it is ready, we will have begun a third. We expect many colonies to be built—in fact, aside from solar-energy stations, colony building will be the chief task of colonials for a long time to come.

“Larger colonies will afford even better protection against cosmic rays, give us a lower rate of gravitational change as we move up and down, a better horizon effect, more natural atmospheric phenomena—perhaps clouds and rainfall. Eventually, we will even have artificial hills and mountains.”

Colonies Won’t Ease Overcrowding

I said, “Could there ever be more colonists than earthmen?”

“That prospect is far in the future, if ever. For centuries at least, the number of colonists will be only a tiny fraction of earth’s population, so that the mother planet will have to continue efforts to control population…. Be careful now, we’re passing through one of the air locks.”

“Where?” I said involuntarily, as I walked up a flight of stairs and over a low barrier.

“The titanium seal is not drawn across right now,” Fenton said. “Each of the six sectors is cut off from its neighbors by an airtight seal. It reduces the problem in case of puncture by meteoroids or accidents within. Any vibration of the torus wall, any small drop in atmospheric pressure will sound an alarm and then automatically close all the locks. Of course, the locks close during the eight-hour night period to prevent light leaks from the agricultural sectors, some of which are under perpetual sunlight.”

“Has it ever happened? Accidents, I mean?”

“No. The probability is small, actually. Meteoroids large enough to penetrate the radiation shield are quite rare, and we offer a very small target. Even if we were punctured, air loss would be slow because of the large volume. Air pressure is only half that on earth though there’s just as much oxygen,” continued Fenton, “but we’ve cut down the nitrogen to slightly under half the earthly level. Visitors aren’t even aware of the difference, except to say that the air is clearer than on earth.”

Vision of a New Land of Plenty

I was walking on a catwalk, and on either side were closely planted tiers.

“This one is our diversified sector,” said Fenton. “Here we have vegetables, chickens, goats, as well as rabbit hutches and fish pools. We depend on recycled water, and this sector contains one of our chief cycling stations.”

He pointed to a windowless metal structure.

“You mean—wastes?”

“Yes, of course. We retrieve water from organic wastes. What’s left is fertilizer. Would you care to go inside?”

I shook my head, “Perhaps not.”

Fenton nodded. “Visitors rarely seem to want to. You understand, don’t you, that recycling proceeds on earth too? There it is a larger circle—less noticeable, but more dangerous. We exclude the pathogenic bacteria from L-5, as you must know from your own physical examination before you came. Frankly, there is far less odor in the cycling station than in the area with the chickens and goats.”

“Even so,” I said, smiling.

“All right. We’ll keep on walking. There are plenty of other things to see. The other agricultural sectors have our grainfields: wheat, rice, corn. Under uniform and controlled sunlight, with unfailing water and fertilizer, equable temperature, and a slightly higher carbon dioxide content in the air, the yields are many times what they are on earth.”

For the moment, I wasn’t listening. We were skirting a long fish pool, and there were small machines moving busily among rows of vegetables. L-5 might be just a pin-wheel in space when viewed from outside, but it was a world once one was inside.

It was the first of many others that would be larger—and better—and that might someday in the far future (who knows?) bear within their graceful bodies the major portion of mankind’s numbers.

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Our Earth as a Satellite Sees It

By W. G. STROUD

Head, Meteorology Branch Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA

The scientist who directed the development and launching of Tiros I, AMS/l’s historic weather satellite, tells of its exciting discoveries and its successors’ promising future THE WORLD has had its picture taken. For the first time in the millions of centuries that our planet has been whirling around the sun, we can see our home as it looks from a tiny companion in space. A man-made satellite, circling some 450 miles overhead, has photographed us not once but thousands of times.

Such spectacular panoramas as the view of Florida on the opposite page show our planet—its continents and seas, its clouds and storms—as never before seen by man except in his imagination.

Streaking around the earth at almost five miles a second, the American experimental weather satellite Tiros I (Television and Infra-Red Observation Satellite) has sent us an enormous number of pictures since Its launching on April 1; its two television cameras have snapped them as rapidly as one every 30 seconds. The 264-pound “hatbox” satellite has also reported continuously on its position, internal temperatures, angle to the sun, and even the condition of its instruments.

Spinning lazily on its axis, Tiros circles the globe once the engineers mounted steadily as “the bird” approached. A giant 60-foot antenna shaped like a dish locked in on the satellite and tracked it across the sky. A babble of signals flowed in, the ground equipment unscrambled them, and—in the familiar manner of a home TV set—”wrote” the pictures on the face of a screen, where a 35-mm. camera automatically photographed them.

In these pictures the maps we studied in our school days seem to come alive. The continents assume their familiar shapes; on page 299 the whole of Italy sprawls before us, the toe of its famous boot apparently poised to kick a cloud-shrouded Sicily into North Africa. The valley of the Nile, where ancient wonders sleep, twists like a dark snake beneath the modern wonder of Tiros I’s wide-angle stare (left).

Though the satellite was amazingly versatile, it could not change its line of vision, as you can by moving your head or eyes. Spin-stabilized like a gyroscope, its axis—and its cameras—pointed always in a single direction. As Tiros I orbited, there were times when the lenses looked out into space.

Solar cells—9,300 of them—spangled the satellite’s sides and top. Converting the sun’s rays into electrical energy, the cells furnished the lifeblood of Tiros’s instruments. But the career of an instrumented satellite on the hostile edge of space is pitifully short. Lengthy, unremitting exposure to the blazing sunlight could quite literally cook it, a key component could break down and silence it, or the annual orbit of the earth around the sun could throw it into prolonged shadow, causing its storage batteries to run down.

Future weather explorers, however, will be largely free of these disabilities. Some will boast infrared scanners capable of taking pictures in the dark; others will eye the earth constantly, turning very slowly to adjust their viewing axis. Once orbited over the poles, such satellites could keep weather developments in all parts of the world under surveillance. And, from an orbit 22,000 miles above the Equator, a single camera could continuously view one-third of the earth.

New World Opens for Weathermen Meanwhile, for meteorologists, Tiros I is uncovering a spectacular new facet of their science. Cloud formations are the chief quarry of its cameras, and these show up on film with remarkable clarity. On an early pass a thin trail of clouds scudding across Sudan and the Red Sea (page 297) suggested a jet stream farther north. A check of conventional weather measurements for the same day verified the presence of the elusive high-altitude wind current.

Time after time, in frame after frame, all sizes and complexities of storm areas appeared: A typhoon took shape off New Zealand, a cyclone in the Indian Ocean. Highly organized cloud patterns spiraled turbulently across 1,000 miles of the Pacific. Spiral formations, in fact, march through the pictures like a recurrent theme; ultimately they may provide us with a key to the life cycles of storms.

Scientists are still strangers in this curious, unmapped world of the topside of the sky. Extensive study and analysis, however, will enable meteorologists to relate these new observations to our present understanding of the earth’s weather. And someday the knowledge gleaned from satellites such as Tiros I will permit man to live at greater ease with the elements.

“The weatherman,” says Dr. Morris Tepper, Chief of NASA’s Meteorological Satellite Programs, “has been like the proverbial blind man who tries to describe an elephant by feeling its trunk. Now, for the first time, his eyes are being opened to a view of the entire animal.”

That was actually a pretty good guess.

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COMSAT: Communication in the Space Age

Not experimental, but commercial, instant worldwide information transmission by satellite
By RAY D. THROWER

In the 17th century, it took about 4 months for news of the New World to reach Europe. Now, with satellite communication, news whips around the globe in seconds. In less than 3 years, instant global communication will be a reality. Advanced communications equipment and the space-age vehicle, the Communications Satellite Corp. and its international partner, Intelsat, are all together responsible for that.

“Just what is COMSAT?” is a question one frequently hears. Many have the idea that COMSAT is a government agency, staffed by Federal civil-service personnel. This mistaken idea probably comes from the fact that COMSAT was authorized by the Communications Satellite Act passed by Congress in 1962. The basic Communications Act of 1934 made no specific provisions for satellite communication. In fact, in 1934, satellite communication was placed in the category of Buck Rogers space adventure stories, popular in the late 1930′s. COMSAT’s relationship to the Federal Government is about the same as the relationship of other communication companies such as General Telephone & Electronics, American Telephone & Telegraph, and International Telephone & Telegraph. They are all Government-regulated, profit-making stockholder-owned organizations.

Radio-Electronics visited the new earth-station facilities at Brewster Flat, Wash., and Paumalu, Oahu, Hawaii, and obtained an interview with Wallace M. Lauterbach. Western area manager for the Communications Satellite Corp. Lauterbach has been in communications for about 25 years.

He was graduated in 1941 from the US Military Academy with a BS in electrical engineering. He obtained his MS from the University of Illinois. During World War II. he commanded signal troops in the Pacific Theater. Since then, he has been executive officer to the Chief Signal Officer, Department of the Army; a member of the US delegation to the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva; military assistant to the telecommunications adviser to the President; and first Commanding Officer, US Army Strategic Communications Command.

When Colonel Lauterbach retired from active duty in June, 1965, he was an obvious choice for Western area manager, Communications Satellite Corp.

After we toured the COMSAT site at Brewster Flat, Wash., Lauterbach invited us into his office for some discussion about COMSAT and the future of space-age communications.

RADIO-ELECTRONICS: What is COMSAT’s purpose?

COLONEL LAUTERBACH: It’s to be a world-wide commercial communications satellite network to provide communications services to business, government, and individuals. Understand one thing: When we speak in terms of “communications” here at COMSAT, we mean not just telephone conversations, though they will be an important part of COMSAT’s activity. But I think the important contributions will be data transmission and. to a lesser degree, video communication.

R-E: Well, will the communications satellites be flexible enough to handle the different kinds of communications circuits you’re talking about? For example, can one single satellite take care of voice, data and video traffic, too?

LAUTERBACH: I’ll give you a qualified yes to that question. Qualified only because of the way it was worded. Yes, the present satellites can handle voice, data and video. But not all at the same time. They can handle a mixture of voice and data. The exact number of circuits depends on the speed, and therefore the bandwidth, of the data circuit. The real limiting factor is the terminal equipment used at the earth stations. The receivers and transmitters are the same for all modes, but the demodulating and modulating equipment is different for voice, data and video.

R-E: How many of each type circuit can satellites handle?

LAUTERBACH: Early Bird, which was our first program, can handle 240 two-way telephone conversations, or 6,200 full duplex, simultaneous teletype circuits, or one television video circuit. It can handle a few computer circuits or hundreds. As I mentioned before, the exact number of computer circuits will depend on the speed of transmission of the data.

R-E: I see. I’d guess that the communications satellites launched early this year can handle more than the 240 voice circuits of Early Bird, true? Do you have a name for the current program?

LAUTERBACH: Let’s take those in reverse. Early Bird was one name for what we call Intelsat I. That’s a single satellite located over the Atlantic off the east coast of South America. The current program, the one that affects us here at Brewster Flat and at Paumalu. is called the Intelsat II series. We have several satellites for this second phase. One did not achieve a usable orbit and is idle. The second is stationed above the Pacific Ocean about halfway between here and Australia. A third will be put on the opposite side of the globe over the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa.

As to channel capacity, Intelsat II spacecraft have the same capacity as Early Bird but more than twice the area of coverage. However, we’re constructing what we call Intelsat III. That will be what we call a “multiple-access” type communications satellite. These so-called global satellites, for use starting in 1968, will have a capacity in excess of 1,200 voice circuits each.

R-E: You’ve mentioned Intelsat several times. What is that?

LAUTERBACH: Intelsat stands for International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium. It’s an organization made up of a group of the member nations of the ITU. the International Telecommunications Union, which is an arm of the United Nations. Right now we have more than 55 member nations in Intelsat. Intelsat owns the satellites. COMSAT holds a majority interest, and acts as manager of Intelsat. Each member nation, or its commercial representative, will own its own earth station. We expect to have as many as 30 earth stations operational by 1968.

R-E: You also mentioned ”multiple-access” satellites. What do you mean by that?

LAUTERBACH: Well, by using a single broadband input receiver, a large number of earth stations, say, 10 or more, can communicate through the same satellite simultaneously, even though each earth station transmits on a different frequency. In fact, for the system to work, each earth station must transmit on a different frequency. Each station is assigned a band in the satellite receiver’s spectrum so one earth station’s transmissions won’t interfere with those of another.

Actually, you know, the communications satellite is a glorified translator, comparable to the vhf/uhf translators used to serve a lot of communities with TV. Our translation frequency is 2.225 GHz.

R-E: What bands do you operate in? I read that it was in the 6-GHz and 4-GHz bands, but there are already so many microwave systems operating in those bands, it would seem you’d have quite an interference problem.

LAUTERBACH: Exactly. Actually, you have no idea of the number of common-carrier microwave systems in operation.

R-E: What are common carriers?

LAUTERBACH: A common carrier is an organization, like a telephone company, that sells communications services. There are so many in operation in the bands we operate in that we’ve had to get sort of a special dispensation from the FCC that any future systems in our vicinity will be installed and operated on a noninterference basis. General Telephone Co. of the Northwest brings in the microwave relay channels that carry the COMSAT circuits out of Brewster Flat. They had to do some special engineering to get their microwave in here in the 1 1-GHz band, so as not to interfere with our 4- and 6-GHz operation.

R-E: What about the case where there was already a system in operation in your band? What do you do then? I’d think this might be pretty important when it comes to site selection.

LAUTERBACH: You’ve just hit on one of the most difficult things about setting up an earth station: site selection. Yes, we have to have an “electronically quiet” environment. Our receivers, which are cryogenic systems by the way, have a sensitivity of —159 dBm*, so, not just any place will do. We looked for quite a while before finding the Brewster Flat site. We’re in the bottom of a saucer-shaped depression between several mountain ranges. The mountains shield us from other microwave systems. Of course, we have a certain maximum angular elevation limit on our surroundings. Anything above 4° might obstruct the path to the “bird.”

R-E: You mentioned your receivers are cryogenic devices. This means they’re supercooled to reduce the natural electron noise, doesn’t it?

LAUTERBACH: Yes. They’re cooled to 4° Kelvin. And that’s close to absolute zero.

R-E: That should keep anything quiet!

LAUTERBACH: It does a good job of it. Actually, we’re not the first to use cryogenics. Radioastronomy systems have been using them for years and many of the telemetry systems for space work use cryogenics.

R-E: Besides the use of cryogenics, are there any other specific technical details in the COMSAT system that aren’t used in the usual communications system?

LAUTERBACH: Oh, yes. One thing that seems to surprise quite a few technicians and even some of the younger engineers is the fact that we transmit and receive simultaneously on the same antenna.

R-E: Could you explain how that works?

LAUTERBACH: The technique has been used for years in microwave and vhf and uhf communications. We use what we call a duplexer. It’s a resonant-cavity device, actually two cavities, one tuned to the transmit frequency and one to the receive frequency. At the resonant frequency, the cavity represents a low impedance to any energy it sees. At any other frequency it looks like an extremely high impedance, so the transmitter output is effectively isolated from the receiver input, but the receiver can still “see” any signal that’s on its frequency.

R-E: Sounds like something very useful. It lets you get away from having to build two of these “monster” antennas for each direction of transmission, doesn’t it?

LAUTERBACH: It sure does. And that cuts down on the overhead. There are some microwave systems that connect as many as eight transmitters and eight receivers to the same antenna, all operating simultaneously.

R-E: Whew! Let’s see. COMSAT was organized in 1962, and you launched your first satellite, Early Bird, in 1965, if memory serves me right . . . ?

LAUTERBACH: That’s correct.

R-E: Then, how did you manage to get all the engineering talent together to design your systems on such short notice?

LAUTERBACH: Our initial ground systems were designed and built by private contractors such as Page Communication Engineers, Sylvania, ITT Federal Labs and others. This may change with COMSAT engineers designing at least portions of the systems. Also, we already find ourselves having to provide engineering and technician advisory services to many national governments. Our transportable earth stations can be taken to remote locations and made fully operational in about 30 days and for a fraction of the cost of the large fixed station. [Since this interview, the 42-foot transportable antenna at Brewster Flat has been dismantled and shipped to the Philippines, where it has been leased for a year.—Editor] We realize that many of the countries that install these systems won’t have personnel trained. So, there is the definite possibility that COMSAT, through Intelsat, may provide the technicians and engineers to train some of the technicians and engineers of newer Intelsat members.

R-E: It seems like COMSAT will be a very interesting job opportunity. I imagine a few engineers and technicians would like to work for a prestige organization like yours.

LAUTERBACH: Definitely. And, with our expansion programs, we’re always looking for people with skills we can use. At a typical earth station, we need about 40 to 50 technical people. About 20% are engineers, the rest technicians. Multiply that by those 30 earth stations I mentioned a moment ago and you have a sizable work force around the world involved in commercial satellite communications.

R-E: What kind of background do you look for in an engineer or technician?

LAUTERBACH: Experienced communications people. We need technicians with vhf and microwave experience and backgrounds in multiplex carrier communications. Solid-state and cryogenic experience is highly desirable.

R-E: Mr. Lauterbach, is a satellite communications system really necessary? Aren’t the undersea cables reliable enough?

LAUTERBACH: The undersea cables? Yes, they certainly are reliable. They’ve served us well for many years and they’ll continue. But their capacity and flexibility are limited. In 1960, there were only about 600 communication circuits out of the United States to the rest of the world overseas. Most of these were by cable, a few by radio. With the growth of the world’s population and the increasing business and government communication needs, we’ll need 12,000 circuits by 1980. We added 240 circuits with Early Bird. This amounted to an increase of about 30%, but the most impressive improvement is the instantaneous availability of these circuits over an area of tens of thousands of square miles.

R-E: What kinds of customers will COMSAT serve?

LAUTERBACH: The most often mentioned example is NASA. We’re providing just about every conceivable type communications circuit to NASA for the Apollo program. Probably one of the most interesting services we propose is to provide voice and data communication to aircraft in flight on trans-oceanic runs.

R-E: Oh, I think I understand. On long over-water flights, vhf communication won’t work, and the hf radio bands are pretty crowded—and not always reliable.

LAUTERBACH: Exactly. Direct communication will play an important role in air traffic control in the future, especially when the 2,000-mile-per-hour passenger liners go into service. Recent estimates show that at any given moment there are over 280 aircraft over the Atlantic alone. And don’t forget the ships at sea. We can provide them with telephone and data service to the home office. That way, if there’s a change in the price of say, oil, in a certain port, the home office can direct the tanker to go to another port where the price is better.

R-E: What about the possibilities of satellite communications systems being used for worldwide educational television? Does COMSAT or anyone else have anything along these lines?

LAUTERBACH: Yes. ABC, CBS and NBC have already expressed interest in this area. Certainly it would be technically feasible. Actually, when we consider the ETV aspect of satellite communications, the only thing that keeps us from doing it is “doing it.” The technology exists. The only thing still necessary is the political and economic backing. COMSAT has already outlined a program for a domestic US satellite system that would serve the major TV networks as well as handle ETV.

R-E: How about computers? Couldn’t they be tied together by communications satellites? This would help in making data available on a world-wide scale. Hugo Gernsback, editor-in-chief of Radio-Electronics, in editorials for December 1959 and May 1964, urged the establishment of a “national facts center.” Using your facilities, a facts center could be international, couldn’t it?

LAUTERBACH: Someone’s been reading our mail! Seriously, though, the establishment of information grids, connected by relay satellite, has already been proposed. Some authorities think that in less than 10 years a student will be able to dial a local computer on his home telephone and program problems into it. This is already being done on a limited scale, but not with relay satellites for computer interconnect. But it could be done.

R-E: I’ll bet engineering firms and other businesses would benefit from being able to tie into such a system.

LAUTERBACH: They certainly would. And they’d find the cost not much more than a monthly telephone bill and a lot less than owning and maintaining their own computer.

R-E: Seems like you’re going to have a lot of people relying on your satellite. What happens if it goes bad after just a few days of operation? Or what if it doesn’t work to begin with? You can’t send a man up to fix it—not yet, anyway. What do you do?

LAUTERBACH: To begin with, our systems are designed to minimize failure. Each component and each unit is designed and tested to meet extreme requirements. The chance of failure is pretty remote. If a failure should occur in a critical component after the bird is up, we still wouldn’t have a failure because the equipment has built-in redundancy. That means there is a parallel unit that will take over the function of the defective unit. And, if, just if, the bird should be a total failure, we do have a couple of spares we can send up. But that’s expensive.

R-E: I guess you’re pleased with Early Bird’s performance. It went up in, let’s see, April of 1965, wasn’t it? And it’s still operating.

LAUTERBACH: Yes, Early Bird had a life expectancy of 18 months. It’s exceeded that by quite a margin. And looks like it will keep going for a while yet. The satellites orbited this year are designed to operate for 3 years and the ones planned for Intelsat III are being designed for a life of 5 years. R-E: What is the power of the transmitter in the satellite?

LAUTERBACH: Six Watts.

R-E: Six watts? But the one at the earth station is 12,000 watts!

LAUTERBACH: It does seem strange, but remember that right now our techniques don’t permit a very high power-to-weight ratio. We’re limited to low-powered transmitters on the satellites. We make up for this by using the large antennas and cryogenic receivers at the earth station. Going the other way, we can transmit from earth with high power and large antennas, with their high gain, and come up with a respectable signal level for the satellite receiver. This way, we can use fairly conventional circuits for the receivers in the birds and get away from having to put huge antennas and cryogenic receiver systems in orbit.

R-E: Then, actually, the complicated circuits are at the earth stations, more so than in the satellites?

LAUTERBACH: In a manner of speaking, that’s true. But that isn’t to say that the circuits in the satellites aren’t up to the state of the art. Some of our equipment is far advanced from the equipment of the more conventional, earthbound systems.

It has to be, because of size and weight limits.

There’s a great future for satellite communications and its engineers and technicians—a future where not even the sky is the limit.

In late January, Intelsat II’s Pacific satellite Lani Bird began to serve in two major functions. AT&T started using the satellite for commercial telephone service—with 6 circuits to Hawaii and 30 to Japan. And ITT initiated commercial TV use of Intelsat II with transmission of an NBC newscast to Nippon Television Corp. Fulltime commercial service is now underway between North America, Hawaii and Japan. The Atlantic satellite Canary Bird was lofted March 22. —Editor

We’re Living in Exploded Universe

THAT the universe can never burst because it has burst already, perhaps ten or twenty billion years ago, and is now in the midst of the most gigantic explosion ever conceived by man, is the suggestion of Sir Arthur Eddington, distinguished English astronomer. What the universe was like before it exploded no one knows. The entire origin and history not merely of man but of the earth have happened during the explosion and probably billions of more years will be available for further evolution before the explosion is over.

AN EYE ON SPACE

By Dr. Dan Q. Posin

PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS, DE PAUL UNIVERSITY SCIENTIFIC CONSULTANT AND ADVISOR, COLUMBIA BROADCASTING SYSTEM

EARTHLINGS ARE PREPARING many kinds of fuels to propel themselves out of this world.

1. Gasoline is inexpensive, and its flow is easy to control. It is, however, hard to store and manipulate. It is not too reliable, as the rocket using it has to be intricate and there are many chances for breakdown. Thrust is moderate to low, amounting to about 270 pounds from one pound of fuel burning per second. Kerosene’s kick also is fairly low.

2. Exotic fuels. Some are common substances difficult to use. Hydrogen could be a powerful fuel if burned, but it is hard to maintain in liquid form. One might liquefy hydrogen by allowing it to combine with an element such as boron, which has a high heat of combustion (25,000 B.T.U.s). So a good exotic fuel is diborane (B2H6), its heat of combustion being 31,000 B.T.U.s per pound. But boron hydrides are poisonous and may explode.

3. Solid fuels are handy, since they can be built into the rocket. Fuel material could be something as simple as rubber burning with the oxygen of some solid compound. But solid-fuel rockets tend to burn unevenly.

4. Nuclear fission engines are under development and, of course, they give high thrust and last a long time. But their radioactive exhaust would contaminate the launching site. The engine may be used after takeoff with safer fuel.

5. Nuclear fusion is something for the future, since controlled fusion has not yet been achieved.

6. Atomic bursts—small atomic blasts will some day be used to propel rockets or spaceships.

7. The ion rocket is one in which charged particles such as cesium ions are accelerated by an electric field and hurled out the nozzle. A cesium atom can easily be made to lose an electron (i.e., become ionized), and then the electric field can act on it. A thrust of more than 20,000 pounds can be obtained for every pound of cesium used up each second, but it is not easy to ionize pounds and pounds of cesium.

8. The plasma-jet rocket operates like this: Some fuel mixture is injected as a vapor, and an electric spark ignites it. The combustion heats up the constituents, and the expanding gases go sizzling out the nozzle.

9. Solar propulsion is of several types. Concave mirrors (or other devices) could absorb sunlight and produce heat to heat some gas, thereby driving it out of the engine. Or, solar heat may spin a turbine which produces electricity to expel ions. Or, sunlight may be used as mere pressure. In regions of vacuum far from restraining gravitational fields, acceleration due to sunlight pressure on a large surface eventually gives the spaceship an enormous velocity.

10. Other energy from space, such as plasma or ion energy belts like the Van Allen belts around Earth, may be used in the future. By ingenious navigation from one belt to another, it may be possible to “sail” almost forever on this fuel just waiting to be tapped.

Some of these may be plucked out of the so-called emptiness of space, for use in helping Earthlings on their way to the stars.

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What the Sputniks Said

Russian scientists disclose how radio waves travel from their satellites to earth

By A. J. Steiger

Radio LISTENERS who tracked the earth-circling travels of Sputnik I have reported new discoveries in short-wave propagation, including a round-the-world echo, according to preliminary findings published in a recent issue of Radio, a Russian popular electronics journal.

What the Sputniks discovered about prospects for using solar power to operate space vehicle instruments is also discussed in the Moscow journal. These reports on Russia’s pioneer space vehicles’ discoveries, the first to be published, are translated here.

Propagation Conditions. “Preliminary results of reception of Sputnik I radio signals,” writes Prof. A. Kazantsev, Doctor of Technical Sciences, in Radio, “show that in the 15-meter wave band these signals were received at very great distances, far surpassing the distance of direct visibility and in a number of cases reaching 10, 000 kilometers. Very valuable material on possible ways of short-wave propagation can be derived from study of the data on long-distance reception of these signals.

“It will be recalled that the satellite orbit’s perigee (its lowest point) was in the northern hemisphere and its apogee (highest point) was in the southern hemisphere. The apogee’s altitude reached about 1000 kilometers above the earth’s surface. In the southern hemisphere, therefore, the satellite traveled above the principal layer of the ionosphere, layer F2, which conditions short-wave reflection.

“Concerning the northern hemisphere, especially interesting short-wave propagating conditions were created. At certain intervals Sputnik I was above the F2 layer of maximum ionization, at others below it, and at certain times close to the maximum.

“When Sputnik I was above layer F2, then passing from above through the mass of the ionosphere, the radio waves were reflected from the earth’s surface and propagated further by single or multiple reflection from layer F2 in those areas where its critical frequency had sufficiently high values (Fig. 1).

“It is also possible that radio waves coming into the ionosphere from above at a sloping angle are considerably refracted and therefore penetrate into an area outside the bounds of direct geometric visibility (Fig. 2).

“When Sputnik I was below layer F2 (Fig. 3), and approached an observation point from a global area lighted by the sun, the radio signals on the 15-meter wave band could come from the satellite to a point of reception, after going through consecutive reflections from layer F2 and the earth’s surface, and then through direct visibility.”

Limited Reception. “If the satellite, after passing over the observation point, moved away into an unlighted area of the globe, signal reception ceased in a relatively short distance, depending on limits of visibility.

“Non-symmetrical reception conditions were also observed. When the satellite was close to layer F2 of maximum ionization, then especially favorable conditions might develop for the formation of radio-wave conducting channels able to propagate radio waves over very long distances (Fig. 4).

“There is evidence, in fact, that along with satellite signals which reached the observation point by the shortest route, signals were sometimes received that had traveled around the globe (round-the-world radio echo). One of the USSR’s most skillful radio amateurs, Yu. N. Prozorskiy of Moscow, on October 8 at 0007-0008 hours recorded the reception of such a round-the-world radio echo in the 15-meter wave band.

“Concerning signals in the 7.5-meter wave band, as far as can be judged at present, they were as a rule received in the limits of direct visibility, although in certain cases owing to high values of daytime critical frequencies of the F2 layer, this wave could be propagated also outside direct visibility.

“A conclusion can be drawn as to precisely what way radio-wave propagation occurred after correlation has been established between the altitudes of Sputnik I and the real altitudes of the F2 layer at one and the same moment, and analysis of the propagation conditions.”

Sun’s Radiation. Discussing preliminary findings of Sputnik II with respect to solar radiation in outer space, Russian Academician A. I. Berg, leading Russian authority on space-flight electronics, wrote in Radio: “Of special interest for radio specialists was the data picked up by the second Soviet satellite on solar radiation in the short-wave band which has a direct effect on conditions in the upper layers of the atmosphere.

“During the course of more than a hundred years, scientists have been exploring the intensity and spectral composition of the radiant energy which falls on the earth from the sun, and have on this basis indirectly been attempting to determine what these magnitudes are for conditions outside the earth’s atmosphere.

“The most reliable data at present permit assuming that the density of the stream of the sun’s radiant energy, beyond the limits of the atmosphere, is equal to 1.4 kilowatt per square meter. In actinometry and meteorology, this magnitude is called the ‘solar constant.’ About 9% of this stream falls on the ultraviolet part of the solar spectrum, about 40% on the visible part, and 51% on the far red and infrared parts of the sun’s spectrum.

“At the earth’s surface, with the sun standing at an altitude of 30° above the horizon, the density of the stream of solar energy is considerably less owing to the dispersion and absorption of solar energy by the atmosphere. It amounts to not more than 30 to 35% of the stream density beyond atmospheric limits and is differently distributed. Only 2 to 3% of it falls in the spectrum’s ultraviolet part, 44% in the visible spectrum, and 54% in spectral heat rays.

“Making these data more precise, particularly the direct measurement of stream density of the sun’s radiant energy, i.e., the solar constant beyond atmospheric limits, will make it possible to determine accurately the sun’s effective temperature and density of the radiant energy stream emitted by a unit of solar surface. Precise measurement here is of interest to astrophysics first of all, but it is of more than [theoretical] importance.”

Battery Requirements. “If a transistor solar battery of 1 square meter in area be constructed and faced toward the sun even with the accuracy of a 30° angle, then as might be expected this surface will be exposed to solar power of the order of 1 kilowatt. With 10% battery efficiency in conversion of solar energy to electricity, the output of such a solar battery surface might be expected to reach 100 watts of electric power.

“But if it be assumed that a satellite flying at a great height is exposed to the sun’s rays approximately two-thirds of its orbit circuit time around the earth, then the solar battery can be expected to produce 100 watt-hours of energy. However, to secure such conditions, the spectral characteristics of the transistor battery must be close to the above-indicated frequency distribution of solar energy, especially in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum, and, moreover, such a battery must operate on an optimum load.

“Unfortunately, the materials presently known that will permit creating batteries that possess high internal resistance are complex and cumbersome. A much lower-magnitude of electric energy should therefore be expected. But even this would nevertheless have great importance as a possible alternate way of powering space vehicle measuring instruments—a solar battery, for example, used in combination with an ordinary or storage battery.” —

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How a New Star Looks

WHEN Nova Herculis was announced in the papers, a few days before last Christmas, many people went out to look for it. As a matter of fact, it was a little disappointing as a naked-eye spectacle; it never came up to first magnitude (the smaller the magnitude, the brighter the star. The two brightest stars are below zero in magnitude.) But it was extremely interesting. Astronomers are still watching it through telescopes and spectroscopes.

What does a star look like through a telescope; even a moderate sized one, like that in the photo at the left?

Well, the photo is a bit deceptive. In a good instrument, a star is still only a point of light. The better the telescope, and the better seeing conditions, the smaller the star. Its brightness increases; but not its apparent size. A comet or a planet, on the other hand, can be magnified. In the eastern sky we have the planet Mars and the star Arcturus, in the early evening. They look alike to the eye; but a telescope makes Mars spread out, bigger and bigger, perhaps till it looks as big as the head of a lead pencil. Arcturus remains simply a point of yellow light; because, while Arcturus is millions of miles across, it is trillions of miles away.

Therefore, when we see Nova Herculis in the photograph as a spot about 1/12″ across, we know it is simply because the plate has been fogged a little around the bright star; while the smaller stars—all too small to be seen by the naked eye— produce spots large or small in proportion to their brightness. The longer a plate is left in the camera of a telescope, the larger all the stars appear on it, and the more of the dim ones appear on the plate. Stars a hundred thousand times too dim to be seen by the eye can be photographed with big instruments.

Because of the brightness of these points of light, it is impossible to measure their apparent diameter in a telescope, or on a photograph; but by an instrument called the interferometer, which brings together two images of the same star to form “fringes” of light, it is possible to measure the diameters of some of our largest “near neighbors” when they run into millions of miles. Such figures, roughly, confirm calculations as to the probable sizes of these stars, in order that they may seem as bright to us as they do. They run from about 300,000,000 miles in diameter down. Since Nova Herculis (as explained in our last issue) blew off a great cloud of hot white material, it is hoped that this may continue expanding until we can see it separate from the star—as a “ring nebula,” like a puff of smoke, with the star in the center. Such objects are known in the heavens; but the explosion must get a great many billion miles away from the star before the smoke puff can be seen separately.

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Science Builds Greatest Telescope

Monster 200-inch “eye” will reveal hitherto unknown secrets of the universe and enrich man’s knowledge of life on earth.

by John Edwin Hogg

Nine years ago Palomar Mountain was a little-known mass of rock and earth in San Diego county, California. Being only 6,129 feet high, it is a mere foothill without even the distinction of altitude in a state where scores of perpetually snow-clad peaks rise to perpendicular heights of nearly three miles. A few Californians knew it as a good place to go deer hunting. Others, well-versed in state lore, had heard of it as the home of Nigger Nate, a fugitive slave who for many years lived the life of a recluse far up on Palomar’s forested slopes. Then suddenly, on October 28th, 1928, Palomar Mountain blared from the headlines of every important newspaper in the world. It was about to become a modern Olympus—the scene of the greatest single scientific endeavor ever undertaken by man. After years of painstaking study and research by astronomers in every part of the world, the board of directors of the Rockefeller Foundation had set aside a sum variously estimated at from six to ten million dollars to crown Palomar with an astronomical observatory housing a telescope beyond all previous dreams—an instrument twice the size of the present world’s largest, the famous 100-inch Hooker telescope on the summit of Mount Wilson. The machinery was set in motion to push back the mysteries of the universe by the inconceivable distance of a thousand million light years!

The volume of space within the previous range of man’s mechanical vision was enlarged eighteen times by the completion of the 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson seventeen years ago. This will be multiplied by ten when the 200-inch instrument scans the heavens from the summit of Palomar some six or eight years hence. It will search space to find and photograph unknown astral bodies a billion light years distant from the earth. One light year is the equivalent of 6,000,000,000,000 (six trillion) miles. Multiply six trillion by one thousand million and you have the estimated range of the new telescope for prying into the mysteries of an unknown wilderness of the universe in terms of miles!

Nine years have elapsed since the Rockefeller Foundation made the funds available to the California Institute of Technology for carrying this stupendous scientific venture to completion. Another eight years will probably pass before the great instrument and the mammoth observatory for housing it are completed on the summit of Palomar. Why does such an important project move so slowly? Well, from intimate contact with astronomers in the construction and operation of the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson, the world-famous Bosscha Sterenwacht te Lem-bang, at Lembang, Java, and the present 200-inch monster to its present stage of development, the writer has learned not to expect such important scientific work to move like the building of a skyscraper or Boulder Dam.

Astronomers are a race of men apart from others. They are not motivated by financial considerations. They speak a language that sends reporters scurrying through the big dictionary for translations that can be read and understood by newspaper readers. They think in terms of a pure science that staggers human imagination—in light years and the history of astronomy, the world’s oldest science. A hundred years of scientific research is as so many days to them. Their own brief lives mean little to astronomy, where there is no time, no beginning to anything—and no end. Another generation of astronomers will carry on from the point where they leave off!

Three great buildings have risen on the Caltech Campus in Pasadena. They have been built and equipped at a cost of more than a million dollars. They are packed with intricate machinery and auxiliary astronomical equipment now being used to find the answers to a thousand and one problems for which there is no engineering precedent. A 200-inch fused quartz disc was cast at Corning, N.Y., and after being allowed to cool with care similar to that bestowed upon the Dionne quintuplets, was safely delivered in Pasadena. There, in the Caltech optical shops, an estimated four-year task of grinding and polishing will convert it into a concave mirror that is to become the reflector for the giant telescope. The mountings for the telescope, which will weigh 500 tons, including the 60-foot, latticed metal tube, are now being built in the Philadelphia plant of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company.

It is interesting to note here that when the construction of the 200-inch telescope was first considered by the California Institute of Technology, the Rockefeller Foundation stood ready to provide funds for a 300-inch instrument. When the glass disc for the mirror of the 100-inch Hooker telescope was cast at St. Gobain, France, in 1913, it was considered that the physical limit of size in glass castings had been attained. Since then the process of fusing quartz into Pyrex glass has been perfected to the point that the building of a 300-inch telescope would now be feasible. But astronomers are a type of men who seldom favor bold experiments liable to end in disaster. Thus, after careful deliberation, they decided against at- tempting to build the 300-inch instrument. The 200-inch telescope, they believe, involves ample pioneering into unknown fields of engineering without such risks of failure as would be certain to arise in the attempted construction of an astronomical monster three times the size of the present world’s largest.

Some idea of such problems may be gained from the fact that a special railway carriage had to be built to transport the 200-inch disc from the factory in Corning, N. Y., to the Caltech shops in Pasadena. The glass is more than 52 feet in circumference —16 feet, 8 inches in diameter. Packing the boxing added several feet to these dimensions. The only possible method of moving such a shipment by rail was to stand it on edge. To do this and insure clearance under bridges and other railway structures the special railway carriage was built with diminutive wheels and an underslung floor. It cleared the rails by only inches. A study of all transcontinental rail lines then had to be made to find one that would permit the shipment to pass. The tightest squeeze on the route eventually chosen was in Buffalo, N.Y., where the lens box cleared an overhead viaduct by a scant three inches! Due to these track hazards, an inspection train moved ahead of the train carrying the disc. Then the caravan crawled across the continent at a pace never greater than 30-miles per hour. It moved only by daylight. Any sort of a major accident here would have set astronomy back by at least three years, to say nothing of financial loss. The glass for a 300-inch telescope would be 25-feet in diameter and could never be moved by rail at all. It would also be next to impossible to move such a disc from any ocean harbor in California to the summit of Palomar. Such considerations, however, would be only a few of the minor engineering problems that will be encountered if man ever attempts the construction of a 300-inch telescope. There would be many other greater difficulties.

Another factor that tended to discourage the attempted building of the proposed 300-inch telescope was that astronomers themselves feared the consequences to their own beloved science from the possible successful completion of such an instrument. They estimate that the field of research to be opened up by the thousand million light year range of the 200-inch telescope cannot be exhausted in less than half a century. The 300-inch telescope, assuming that it might have been built, might work to the detriment of astronomy by hurling it into confusion instead of advancing the science by orderly progression.

The astronomers of Caltech and the Carnegie Institute who will have full cooperative use of the 200-inch telescope hold out no hope that the instrument will tell us anything more than we now know concerning plant and animal life that may or may not exist on the other planets. But in the course of time they do expect it to give us the answers to many questions that have puzzled mankind for centuries. It may tell us what our world is, why we are here and where we are going as passengers on this little astral sphere whirling around through un-fathomed space. It may tell us whether our universe is exploding, is disintegrating by the dissipation of heat or is being replenished from sources unknown. It may prove or disprove the much-debated theory of Professor Albert Einstein to tell us whether we’re living in a “rubber universe” expanding like a toy balloon under pressure from within—a universe imprisoned behind curved walls or a creation that merely goes floating around through space which is without time, without a beginning, and without an end!

Research stimulated by the undertaking has already advanced astronomical technique by fully half a century—even six to eight years in advance of the monster telescope being trained into the heavens. Industrialists and inventors, anxious to have a part in this stupendous endeavor, have developed improved lenses, new photographic emulsions, new metals, new alloys and many previously unknown mechanical processes. It has produced a new process for aluminizing mirrors, which will be used for the first time in the Palomar instrument, taking the place of quicksilver used in the Mount Wilson observatory and in other reflecting telescopes. The new shops at Caltech are now literally crammed with instrumental improvements, specialized machines, and -tools born of new necessity.

In selecting Palomar as the site for the 200-inch telescope in preference to hundreds of others investigated in every part of the world, countless factors bearing upon the success of astronomy had to be taken into consideration. Such things as climate, clarity of atmosphere, freedom from aurora borealis and many others, are of tremendous importance. One of the chief reasons for the final choice of Palomar, however, was to avoid the mistake that was made some years ago when the 100-inch Hooker instrument was located on the summit of Mount Wilson.

Artificial light in the atmosphere is as much the enemy of astronomers as it is of a photographer working in the dark room. Go to the summit of Mount Wilson any clear night during the dark of the moon and you will soon see why many of the results anticipated for the 100-inch telescope have failed to materialize. You will look down upon one of the most spectacular displays of artificial light to be seen anywhere in the world—the lights of Los Angeles, Pasadena, Long Beach and scores of other cities stretching away like a carpet of diamonds from the mountains to the sea. Countless tourists go to the top of Mount Wilson every year just to see southern California looking like an inverted heaven with all the stars of the universe assembled into a vast panorama. It’s a magnificent sight but little does the average tourist realize how it be-devils astronomers.

When the Mount Wilson telescope was completed Los Angeles was a city of half a million souls. It is now a metropolis of 1,500,000 and every other city in southern California has experienced similar growth. While the average population has approximately doubled in the last sixteen years the use of electricity has increased ten-fold. As a result there are many nights when the atmosphere over Los Angeles County is so flooded with light that the astronomers on Mount Wilson have to knock off work. Here is a potential fortune staring some genius of illumination engineering right in the face. All this light that escapes upward from the lamps of mankind— BILLIONS OF KILOWATTS OF IT EVERY YEAR—is senseless waste!

On Palomar every condition was found to be favorable for the full use of the 200-inch telescope. Along with all the other considerations the astronomers were looking for a dark spot-one that must forever remain dark because the surrounding topography will not permit the building of any great and well-lighted cities. From the site of the new observatory the lights of San Diego find Los Angeles are visible on opposite horizons. But they’re far enough away not to worry the astronomers.

An astounding feature of Palomar Mountain is that there is nearly 30 square miles of fairly flat land on the summit. Thus, when the 200-inch telescope is set up inside a steel dome 135 feet in – diameter that will house it, we shall see the world’s first astronomical observatory where aviation will serve countless purposes of transportation. A large aviation field is now being prepared beside the 640 acres of grounds set aside for the observatory and auxiliary buildings. Instead of grinding over the tiresome drive now necessary to get up and down the mountain by the present motor roads, the astronomers of the future will journey to and from their mountaintop retreat like bees going in and out of a hive. The observatory will be a flight of only a few minutes from the laboratories and shops on the Caltech Campus. Movements of personnel and equipment will be largely through the air. A system of short-wave radio telephones will serve all purposes of instantaneous communication.

Some intimation of the discoveries anticipated from the 200-inch telescope may be gained from the fact that the physical limit of distance with the Mount Wilson instrument was reached when Dr. Milton Humason photographed the spectra of a nebula 240,000 light years away. It had an outward velocity of 26,000 miles per second. With the 200-inch sky camera it should be possible to obtain similar spectra at a distance of five hundred million light years. If the distance velocity already established still holds, such nebulae would have a speed of 55,000 miles per second. If such velocities are real and present theories concerning them are sustained; and telescopes more powerful than anything now contemplated are eventually built, astronomers believe nebulae will be discovered moving at the speed of light.

On favorable nights the 200-inch telescope will give us better photographs of Mars, Jupiter and our other planet neighbors than any previously made. The images will be no larger than those already made with the 100-inch instrument, but they should be clearer. This is due to the fact that in the 100-inch telescope the light rays are weakened by being spread over the photographic plate, making a slow time exposure necessary to record them. In the 200-inch telescope the light rays will be more concentrated. They will not be blurred when such photographs are made almost like snapshots.

The second outburst of T Coronae, however, clearly proves that the collapse theory is wrong.”

It is true that the nova on T Coronae Borealis which is a recurrent nova was not due to gravitational collapse of the star. However the other supernova they talk about, “Tycho’s Star“, is actually a type Ia supernova and was caused by the collapse of a white dwarf.

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When Suns Explode

Ours seems sturdy, but bursting stars reveal illness of others.

By DONALD H. MENZEL

Professor of Astrophysics, Harvard University AN EXPLODING star is not news. Dozens of stars blow up each year, increasing: their brilliance 10,000 times or more. Most of them, however, are extremely faint before the outburst, and even at peak brightness are not visible to the naked eye. Really bright objects are rare. But when a star bursts twice in a century-that is astronomical news! It gives us significant scientific information about such stars.

In 1866 a “nova” or so-called “new star’ flashed out in the constellation Northern Crown. It was certainly not a true new star. A distant sun had exploded and greatly in-creased its output of energy. The brilliance faded rapidly until the star could be seen only with a telescope. When it was about hundred times too faint to be seen with the naked eye, it stopped fading. It remained a faint star, fluctuating somewhat in brightness, until Feb. 9, when it blew up again. The astronomers call it T Coronae Borealis, i.e., T (variable star) of the constellation Northern Crown.

In 1866 photography was young and pictures of stars were not possible. But we have followed the variations of T Coronae ever since. We have studied its characteristics, some of them puzzling. Finding the answer to these might give us more information about the nova phenomenon.

We know little about the “pre-nova” stage. There are so many stars that we cannot hope to pick out for special study one that may explode some day. The star gives no advance warning of its approach- The burst of a nova is a fantastic explosion. The increase in stellar brilliance is as startling as if a firefly suddenly glowed like an arc light! The energy dissipated in a nova explosion is equal to more than that of 100 quintillion atomic bombs. A single bomb, to release that much energy, would have to be almost as large as the earth.

Somewhere in the star vast energy is suddenly released. This energy, struggling to escape, works its way to the surface.

The star expands like a soap bubble, all the while increasing m brilliance. Finally, the outer layers are blown entirely away, receding into the distance as filmy wisps of nebulae. Gradually the star subsides to something like its original brilliance. In many novae, some years after the outburst, the fragmentary shell of expanding gas is still dense enough to show up as a nebular ring encircling the star.

The average nova in its final stages appears to be much hotter than it was initially.

Observations indicate that the expanding gases around the star may continue to have a temperature of more than 1,000,000° C. for years after the outburst.

Certain astronomers have suggested that the whole phenomenon of novae is due to collapse of the star, and that the energy released in the explosion was produced by compression within. They argue that the nova is a stage in the star’s evolution, the outburst marking one last splurge before it settles down to enjoy a lengthy old age.

The second outburst of T Coronae, however, clearly proves that the collapse theory is wrong. It tells us that the tendency of a star to blow up is a sort of disease; some inherent structural weakness causes only certain varieties of stars to become novae.

This conclusion is somewhat heartening to us. It renders the chance of our sun’s exploding extremely small. The long record of solar dependability goes back over geological time, more than a billion years. During that interval the sun has never so much as doubled or halved its energy output. The common solar disturbances, such as sun spots or expelled jets of gas, do not indicate that the sun is likely to explode completely, as a few writers have suggested. Perhaps they are “safety valves” that regulate the star, and prevent catastrophe.

There are two other stars that appear to be repeating novae: RS Ophiuchi and T Pyxidis. Neither of these is as clear-cut a case as our recent example. The indications are that T Coronae—before the explosion—may have had an extremely bloated and fairly cool atmosphere surrounding a very hot and tiny core. During the outburst, this surrounding gas is blown out with other material. Thus the star (the minute core) is indeed much smaller after the explosion than before, as the observations demand, but there is no collapse.

The star probably explodes in jets, rather than uniformly all over the surface. The inner regions are so hot that the color of light has a distinct violet hue and the ultraviolet radiation is extremely intense. Along the jets the color changes from violet to blue to dazzling white. There may be a slight tinge of pink on the outer edges of the puffs, where the temperature is lowest. Between successive outbursts, T Coronae succeeded in at least partially rebuilding the bloated atmosphere, for the color displayed was often very red.

A nova outburst does not seem to be a major catastrophe in the life of the star. In most cases the star recovers and may prepare for another relapse in the near— or distant—future. Even a few thousand years is a short time in the life history of a star.

Most new stars have exploded only once within the memory of man. But it is quite possible that some of these may burst again.

The most famous of all novae is Tycho’s star, which outshone all but the planet Venus, in the year 1572. There were no telescopes then, and we do not know which of several faint stars in the vicinity may be the one Tycho observed. This outburst was so great that astronomers call it a supernova—a very rare phenomenon indeed. The explosion may have wrecked the star completely, so that we may not have a recurrence. But astronomers still watch, hopeful of seeing it again.

A variable star in Andromeda, Z Andromedae, shows signs of novalike activity and some day may flare into brilliance. Watch these places in the sky and you may some day see an unaccustomed star there. If you should see a nova, notify the nearest astronomical observatory by telegraph, as soon as you have checked that it is not just a planet. Those familiar with the sky can do a real service to astronomy and science by watching for and reporting new stars.

When one of these objects appears, astronomers all over the world train their telescopes upon it and take photographs and spectra (rainbow colors) in rapid succession.

The earlier stages are particularly important because we know least about them, and because the changes are most rapid.

The energy source of these tremendous explosions may well be some sort of nuclear reaction, different from, but none the less akin to, those in the atomic bomb. In ordinary stars the release of atomic energy appears to be well controlled, but in the novae the processes appear to get out of hand and the tremendous bursts occur.

Theoretical and observational studies of these- atom-star-bombs are important for scientific advance. The knowledge gained of gases at high temperature, the behavior of tremendous explosions and the conditions giving rise to them, may contribute to the problem of atomic power. It will certainly help us to understand a star’s constitution.

PLANETS ON UMBRELLA MAKE ASTRONOMY EASY

A new invention for amateur astronomers is said to make self-instruction in the secrets of the skies easy and absorbing. It is a homemade planetarium, which reproduces in miniature the dome of the heavens, showing the planets and constellations mapped out in their proper positions.

The unique contrivance was constructed by a New York City inventor from simple frame parts of metal and wood, while an old umbrella hood served for a dome. It rests on wheels so that it can be moved about without difficulty.

Attached to the frame is a series of bar magnets placed in line with the wooden strut which supports the umbrella dome. If the device is held off the ground by a string, these magnets swing the frame so that the center point of the dome points directly at the North Star. The astronomer in this way obtains his bearings, and is ready to study the stars by verifying their positions according to the carefully labeled map on the inner surface of the umbrella dome.

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What the New Domestic COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES Will Do for You

Canada’s pioneering Aniks, and U.S. successors, are introducing the revolutionary innovation of overland telephone-and-TV relays in the sky. They promise bargain rates for long-distance phone calls, picture phones that everyone can afford—and better television programs, by way of novel kinds of TV networks

By WERNHER von BRAUN
PS Consulting Editor, Space

On Jan. 11, 1973, Rudy Pudluk, community manager of Resolute on a Canadian island above the Arctic Circle, made a long-distance phone call to Ottawa. The English-speaking Eskimo chatted with Gerard Pelletier, Minister of Communications, and with David Golden, president of Telesat Canada, whose system carried his voice across the frozen North.

His call began commercial operations of Anik 1, North America’s first domestic communications satellite—and the world’s first domestic one in a synchronous orbit, like that of our transocean Intelsat satellites.

Anik 1 was launched from Cape Kennedy on Nov. 9, 1972. It hangs stationary with respect to Earth, 22,300 miles high, over the equator and the eastern Pacific at 109° west longitude (which puts it due south of Gallup, N.M., and mid western Canada). From its lofty height it views Canada coast to coast.

By the time you read this it will have been joined nearby in orbit by an identical twin, Anik 2, if all has gone well. One communications satellite has ample relaying range to span the continent; Anik 2 will simply add more message-carrying capacity, and be a backup in orbit. Anik 3, completing the litter, will be kept on the ground as a spare.

Within a year the United States will follow Canada’s example and launch domestic communications satellites of its own. They’ll transmit phone calls, television programs, telegrams, Telex, U.S. Postal Service Mailgrams, facsimiles of documents, computer data. A hotel-reservation service may find you accommodations via satellite.

A new kind of message net. For years we’ve enjoyed the advantages of transocean phone-and-TV satellites—but the Western world has waited until now for domestic ones, satellites linking points within a country’s own borders.

Understandably they came first in the Soviet Union—a nation with interior distances so vast that people in Vladivostok are awakening to a new day, when their countrymen in Kiev are going to bed the night before. Since 1965, the USSR has been spanned by Molniya (“lightning”) domestic communications satellites in elliptical orbits at steep angles to the equator.

Communications have to be switched from one Molniya to another as they pass successively over the country. Currently, however, the Russians are reported to have developed a synchronous version (awaiting launching at this writing) that will stay put in the sky as the Aniks do.

Anik means “brother” in Eskimo —and Telesat Canada, established by the Canadian Parliament in 1969, has set up a network extending all the way from Canada’s densely populated south to the remote northern settlements of its Eskimos and Indians.

The 37 satellite-linked earth stations of its initial net include two “heavy-route” ones at the Toronto and Victoria transcontinental-route terminals, with 98-foot dish antennas resembling those for global satellites; other stations’ dishes are smaller. Six “network television” stations transmit and receive TV; 25 “remote TV” stations receive it only.

“Northern telecommunication” stations at Resolute and Frobisher Bay establish a moderate-traffic phone link to lines in the south. “Thin-route” stations on Baffin Island and at Igloolik provide limited phone service to small Arctic communities. High-frequency radiotelephone links, available only two hours a day and subject to interference and fading, served Arctic outposts before.

What Aniks are like. Skillful design makes Anik an “economy” satellite. At bargain cost it offers phone-and-TV capacity in the same class with the big Intelsat IVs from the same maker, Hughes Aircraft.

Smaller than an Intelsat IV (11% feet high instead of 17%) and much lighter in weight (about 1200 pounds at liftoff, vs. 3100), an Anik is less expensive to buy, and to launch into orbit, a service for which the owner reimburses NASA. A Thor-Delta vehicle suffices, rather than the huskier Atlas-Centaur it takes to loft the Intelsat. All told, an Anik in orbit costs about $16% million, compared to about $29% million for an orbited Intelsat IV. It likewise is designed for a seven-year lifetime.

Chunky little Anik receives signals from Earth, and retransmits them back to other points, with a five-foot parabolic antenna of fine gold mesh rather than a solid dish. For electric power, some 20,000 solar cells surround Anik’s drum-shaped body. According to Telesat Canada, an Anik satellite’s 12 transponders (radio repeaters) give it a total capacity of up to nearly 12,000 oneway voice circuits—enough for 6000 two-way phone conversations—or 12 color television programs, at once.

Up to within a few months of Anik 1′s launching, the United States had done little about domestic communications satellites of its own.

It had been a pioneer with communications satellites. It played a leading part in establishing the Comsat/Intelsat net of global satellite links; and the Aniks themselves were built by a U.S. firm. But U.S. domestic ones long went neglected, for a simple reason: The U.S. already had a splendid network of coaxial cables and microwave towers, which seemed entirely capable of providing good long-distance communications and of expanding fast enough to meet ever-growing needs.

Domestic communications satellites, however, can do things far beyond the reach of any earthbound system. Realizing this, the Federal Communications Commission cleared the way for them on June 16, 1972. It laid down the basic rules in a memorable “open skies” decision, which assured lively competition in the field: A go-ahead for U.S. systems. The FCC announced it was ready to license a limited number of technically and financially qualified U.S. companies to set up their own commercial systems of domestic communications satellites. Each system was to consist of the necessary space elements and ground stations, and would be expected to offer its channels to an emerging market of interested customers.

The scramble was on!

Some U.S. companies couldn’t wait to get their own satellites into orbit, and began setting up arrangements with Telesat Canada to lease Anik channels—which could serve U.S. cities just as well. Canadian users’ needs already claimed most of Anik 1′s capacity, but Anik 2 would have plenty to spare. The American Satellite Corp. and RCA were among prospective U.S. Anik customers.

Efforts to get systems of U.S. domestic communications satellites into early operation looked much like a race, with at least seven contenders. These were examples: Even before Hughes had completed Canada’s three Aniks, it had Western Union’s order for three more of the same. Western Union planned to orbit the first of them before mid-1974. Its “Westar” domestic-satellite system, besides carrying its own messages, would have channels to lease to all comers.

American Satellite Corp. (jointly owned by Fairchild Industries and Western Union International) contracted with Hughes for three 12-transponder domestic satellites, and made a down payment to NASA for a first launch in the third quarter of 1974. By then it planned to have a network of eight ground stations, near New York, Dallas, Chicago, Washington, Atlanta or Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

It has also initiated, with Fair-child, design and development of an advanced 24-transponder domestic communications satellite for future use in its system.

Big ones by 1975. For lease to AT&T, Communications Satellite Corp. will establish a U.S. domestic-satellite system with four big satellites, three in orbit and one on the ground. The first is to be launched in 1975. Announced details show them to be as large as Comsat’s global Intelsat IVs and of even greater message capacity: They’ll be about 18 feet high and weigh about 3100 pounds at liftoff by Atlas-Centaur vehicles. Each 24-transponder satellite will provide some 14,400 two-way voice-grade circuits. It will have two dish antennas of five-foot diameter, one vertically polarized and the other horizontally polarized (see box on technology below).

The three orbiting satellites will provide domestic-satellite service to all 50 states and Puerto Rico, and will be incorporated into AT&T’s nationwide network “to expand and diversify its services to customers.”

A satellite in synchronous orbit (as all these coming ones will be) is like a 22,300-mile-high microwave tower. It is in line-of-sight contact with every point in the U.S. Radio energy can therefore be beamed up to it (“uplink”) and down from it (“downlink”) in straight lines. Relatively short stretches of land lines, of course, connect users with the nearest Earth terminals.

Innovations we’ll see. Changes we can expect domestic satellites to bring about have been compared to those from paperback books. Books weren’t new; the real novelty of the paperbacks was their availability in so many places and at such low cost.

Even the most conservative planners expect the FCC’s “open skies” ruling to revolutionize the entire pattern of telecommunications in the United States. Here is why domestic communications satellites (“dom-sats” as they’re already being called (or short) are so exciting:

• They can provide many more channels, for the same investment, than conventional long-distance cables or microwave lines.

• A domestic communications satellite can carry a telephone call from Washington to Los Angeles as cheaply as from Washington to Baltimore.
Beyond a certain distance—say, 1000 miles for the present—the satellite route is the more economical one. First rates proposed for leasing U.S. domestic-satellite voice circuits give a striking example. The cost is only one-third as much as for coast-to-coast voice-grade circuits by land routes.

Presuming that the ultimate user will eventually share the benefit of the saving, agreeably lower rates for long-distance telephone calls could be your introduction to the practical advantages of domestic satellites.

• Communications satellites can connect one point with a multitude of other points—unlike a coaxial cable or a string of microwave towers on the ground, which always go from one point to another point.

In a TV hookup, for example, a domestic satellite can relay a program originating in New York to 50 or more TV stations throughout the nation, for local transmission—either via broadcast or cable TV.

Better TV on the way. Joining cable-TV systems into regional and national networks by satellite may be foreshadowed as early as this month. Subject to FCC clearance, an East (‘oast program was to be transmitted to Anaheim, Calif., by way of Anik in a June trial planned by TelePrompTer Corp., the largest cable-TV operator. This would test the feasibility of its “spacecast” plan to connect its cable-TV systems in 33 states and two Canadian provinces with a U.S. domestic satellite in 1974.

The predictable hook-up of local cable TV to satellites will drastically change our entire mode of distributing television programs.

A vast number of available uplink channels can simultaneously bring an advanced satellite dozens of different programs, originating in different cities. Each receiving station can draw upon a rich variety of fare for its viewers’ delectation. Moreover, the number of receiving stations can far exceed the present number of television stations, because they quietly feed the received signal into the local TV cable, rather than tying up a precious frequency “on the air.”

You’ll have a wider choice of what you want to watch through a recent FCC ruling: Franchises for new cable-TV installations, henceforth, will be granted only if they provide two-way communication.

If you prefer a free program sponsored by a commercial advertiser, fine. If you don’t want to miss a particular noncommercial pay-TV program—one of 50 programs the satellite may offer at the time—you just punch a two-digit number into a “touch-tone” communicator on your television set. The cable relay station will release the requested program to your set, and bill you at the end of the month.

In this way TV at last will break free of “lowest common denominator” programs (which often capture the highest Nielsen ratings), and be able to meet the infinite diversity of individual tastes.

TV will also be enabled to make a much greater contribution in the field of education. Congestion at campuses could be relieved if students went to their universities only for seminars, discussions, and laboratory work, while boning up on their chosen subjects via TV.

TV direct from the sky. A high-powered synchronous satellite can broadcast TV programs, beamed up to it from a central ground transmitter, direct to specially equipped individual receiving sets on Earth. (Due to the shorter frequencies used, the familiar rake-shaped TV antenna will be replaced by a wire-mesh dish about the size of a beach umbrella.) While this may be a long way off for home entertainment, it has immediate interest for educational programs in remote areas.

As soon as next year, the huge Fairchild-built ATS-F television-broadcast satellite, first of its kind, will give the idea a trial. (ATS is for Applications Technology Satellite, a many-purpose NASA series; F designates the sixth.) Weighing 2800 pounds at launch by a Titan III-C into synchronous orbit, ATS-F will unfold in space great solar-panel booms of total 52-foot span and an umbrella-shaped antenna of 30-foot diameter. First, in U.S. experiments, it will broadcast educational programs to Indian reservations in the Rockies, and to Eskimo settlements in Alaska.

In 1975, ATS-F’s thrusters will nudge it around the equator from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean for a momentous trial of a plan to beam educational TV all over northern In- dia LPS, May ’70], Experimental broadcasts will go to community TV receivers set up for the purpose in hundreds of remote villages.

Success of this ATS-F experiment would open the way to a projected operational system of India’s own, which could well make it the first country with direct sky-to-receiver television on a national scale. The full-fledged system would reach as many as thousands of villages via satellite, with educational programs broadcast in local tongues and suited especially to local needs.

More things are ahead. Steerable needle beams (see “technology” box) will open up a new era in communication with moving vehicles. Telephone service enroute can be provided quite readily for passengers in aircraft, ships, buses, and autos. In the eighties, automobiles will come with a circular receive-and-transmit antenna buried in the roof, flush and invisible. It will permit you to call anyone else on the globe from your moving car.

Picture phones for everyone. The almost unlimited channel capacity of communications satellites will finally transform video telephone service from an expensive luxury into a popular-priced amenity of everyday living.

This will not only be good news for young lovers—it will also help to keep fathers and husbands at home. Future monthly meetings of a national corporation’s general managers will no longer require their physical presence at corporate headquarters in a distant city.

Instead, each participant will sit before a 3-D color camera in a booth at his home office. Relayed by satellite, the images of all the others are projected upon the curved wall of the booth, and their voices are heard. All have the feeling of being seated together in the same room, around the same table.

Letting the electrons and microwaves do the traveling will become the fashion of the eighties. In the long run it will help to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution; it could even contribute to abating the energy crisis and countering the troublesome trend toward ever more urbanization.

I have heard it said that if Alexander Graham Bell had waited until the advent of satellites and microwaves to invent the telephone, instead of stringing the globe with millions of tons of copper wire, he would have opted for switchboards in the sky.

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What’s ahead in domestic satellites’ technology Reducing ground stations’ cost will help them grow in number to make the most of domestic communications satellites. This can be done by boosting power (and cost) of the satellite. The trend is that way in the Intelsat community—so a trans-ocean message to a developing country’s $3-million ground station won’t incongruously have to reach a town 50 miles away by the local tom-tom system. (It had been only logical to put the burden of weight and expense on the ground when the satellites and launch techniques were in their infancy.) As important as higher power is “spectrum conservation.” Frequencies are limited; separate use of the same frequency in “vertical” and “horizontal” polarization makes them go twice as far. The electromagnetic waves swing up-and-down, left-and-right, respectively. Careful antenna and circuit design can keep them from interfering with each other. An alternative is to aim two beams of identical frequency at different spots on Earth—as can be done with large enough antenna dishes, far enough apart.

Higher frequencies will reduce the size of large, cumbersome-to-launch antenna arrays and ultimately permit steerable needle-sharp beams to be pointed down at small-area ground targets. That will open the way to high-speed channel switching, another way to get more mileage from limited frequencies. When the satellite relays a TV program to a ground station or a number of them, of course it ties up that frequency for the program’s duration. But the frequency used to relay a rare telephone call to a remote town can be reassigned to another call in much less time.
Beam-steering and frequency-reassignment require sophisticated equipment. To route a dial-phone call, you dial digits that activate a string of switching relays. A similar coded instruction will be sent to future satellites from the call-originating ground station. Solid-state switching equipment will select an available downlink frequency and aim it by needle-sharp beam at the destination. A great number of beams can emanate simultaneously from a satellite.

Advanced technology will enable one satellite to handle 100,000 circuits or more with ease.

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Are the Russians Beating Us Into Space?

By G. Harry Stine
Viking-Aerobee Operations Engineer
White Sands Proving Ground

CLOSE on the heels of the White House announcement concerning the United States’ unmanned satellite project, the Russians came out with the announcement that they would also put an “automatic cosmic laboratory” into orbit around the earth.

The date given by the White House for the launching of the first American satellite was 1957. The Russians say they will have one up in 1956!

Are the Russians really that far ahead of the United States in rocket research? Or are they merely bluffing to uphold their national prestige.

Part of the answer is revealed by talking with some of the ex-German rocket scientists at White Sands Proving Ground. They were first-hand witnesses to the break-up of German rocketry.

In 1945 both the Russians and the Western Allies were advancing rapidly into the collapsing Third Reich. The Germans’ prime rocket center was at Peenemunde on the shores of the Baltic Sea. According to reports and the stories of the German rocket men in this country now, this center was evacuated when the Russians got close and a temporary headquarters was set up near Nordhausen in the Hartz Mountains. Nordhausen was the big underground assembly plant for the huge V-2 rockets and was finally overrun by American troops. Peenemunde was taken by the Russians. But they were not the only rocket research centers in Germany; the Germans literally had them everywhere, for there were 12 different guided missiles in the final stages of development in Nazi Germany in 1945, although at one time the Germans were working on 48 different missiles!

Nordhausen was in the territory to be occupied by the Russians, so the Allies stripped the Nordhausen factory, taking anything and everything that even looked like a rocket part. A few days later the Russians moved in and took it over.

The United States got about 100 V-2 rockets, most of the research scientists and engineers who had built the giant rocket and a great number of technical papers and blueprints.

But the Russians got Peenemunde, Nordhausen, nearly 200 V-2′s, all the production facilities that had not been stripped, and about twice as many German rocket men as we did. Most of these men were production people rather than scientists.

We brought the scientists to this country with the V-2′s. They showed us how to fire them, then got to work on new missiles such as the Army’s Redstone. We shot up our V-2′s in upper atmosphere research and concentrated on building newer and more advanced rockets. It was almost a matter of starting from scratch since the United States had only a limited amount of technical knowledge in spite of the fact that Goddard and the ARS had originally developed nearly 90 per cent of the principles right here!

The Russians learned to fire V-2′s, too. And they had the production facilities and production men. In 1950 George Sutton of North American Aviation, Inc., reported that the Germans had put the V-2 rocket back into production. According to the magazine Aviation Week, the Russians had given it to the Red Army troops by 1948 as an operational weapon.

This story is pretty well backed up by the tales told by the Germans who came to this country. A lot of their friends had been taken by the Russians and they never heard from some of them again. But a short while ago a very significant development took place: a German at White Sands— he’s now a naturalized U.S. citizen—got a letter from one of his friends who had vanished back in 1945 behind the Iron Curtain. While the letter told nothing, the man was back in Germany again. It was somewhat of an indication that the Russians might have picked the brains of the German rocket men and are now proceeding on their own!

By 1953 rumors began reaching this country saying that the Russians had made real improvements on the V-2. They were getting ranges of 500 miles with accuracies of plus-or-minus 2,000 feet at that range. This might seem to be a little fantastic, but the Germans actually achieved an accuracy of about plus-or-minus 2,000 feet at 230 miles range with the V-2 in early 1945.

There were also stories about a super-powerful Russian rocket motor, the Model 103, supposedly capable of 460,000-pounds of thrust and burning kerosene and liquid oxygen. This may well be a development of the V-2 motor for this was the propellant combination the Germans would have liked. But kerosene and gasoline were not available due to the general shortage of petroleum products in the Third Reich.

Recent reports state that the Russians claim to have fired single-stage rockets to 250 miles altitude. They even claim to have made mammal flights with monkeys and mice to 150 miles with successful recoveries.

There is no way of checking some of these reports. Some may be wild rumors, others exaggerated news releases. Our intelligence agencies undoubtedly know more, but they aren’t talking.

But, in spite of these stories, and in spite of the fact that the majority of the information on America’s rocket program is classified, the author is extremely doubtful that the Russians are ahead of us .. . right now.

One particular faction among American rocket people has a very good reason to believe that we have not lost the race, although the race is probably close. They are the electronics specialists, the guidance and control people, the radar men, the instrument men. They all know that a rocket, regardless of how good its motor is, is nearly useless unless you can guide it or have it guide itself.

Anti-aircraft rockets, ICBM’s, or sounding rockets all must have control or they remain big skyrockets. Control and guidance is the single factor which separates modern rockets from their pyrotechnic ancestors.

Soviet progress in nucleonics startled the Western world at the Geneva nuclear power convention, but some experts still maintain that the Russian electronic industry has a long way to go to match ours. Without electronics to guide Russian missiles, it is rather illogical to think that they might surge ahead. Our electronics industry is the result of a great deal of individual incentive and the growing knowledge that progress means better products and markets for those products. Most people have no conception of the staggering assortment of advanced electronic material available today on the open American market. It is only an indication of what is available to American rocket people in the form of equipment and components still highly classified.

The real test will come in the sky. We may not know the answer until we see a bright speck in the sky near sunset. As a rough guess, it is about a 50-50 chance right now that that speck might be carrying a Red Star on its side.

It is time we stopped considering the conquest of space as a silly, fantastic dream. It is real. It is coming. And it is now a matter of national honor and prestige. It will determine for the rest of the world whether or not we are the wonderful Yankee wizards we claim to be.

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Rockets and Their Hazards

IT is now about a thousand years since the first Chinese rocket engineer tied one of his new go-devils to an arrow and took a shot at the invading Tartars. Perhaps the millennial celebration of that invention will include a shot with a much larger rocket at the moon. However, the present-day rocket experimenters are plugging away steadily, improving details in their equipment, and thinking in terms of thousands of feet of ascent; while the fiction writers glibly describe steering a rocket craft through asteroids and meteor showers, like a taxi through traffic. There is undoubtedly merit in keeping a glittering goal before the nose of the rocketeer, Hike the proverbial carrot before a donkey (no comparison of the donkey to the rocketeer, except that both are fearless and stubborn).

A hundred and twenty years ago, the powder rocket had been developed to nearly its practical limit as a weapon of war. The “red glare” so vividly described in our national anthem was that of British “Congreve” rockets, used to supplement cannon and mortar fire in the bombardment of Fort McHenry. But, after that period, the rocket fell back into its old status as a pretty firework or, at its best, a signal.

Some years ago the possibility of interplanetary communication was revived. (It had been suggested by John Kepler, the founder of modern astronomy; but, when it was proved that a vacuum exists between the planets, the hopelessness of using aircraft for the purpose was evident.) Robert Esnault-Pelterie, in France, and Dr. Robert H. Goddard, in America, published discussions of the possibility of sending a projectile by this means to another planet. Goddard suggested that a rocket, charged with flash-powder, might be shot to the moon; where its explosion would be visible in a large telescope. He initiated experiments—not with a shot to the moon—but with the purpose of determining the action of a rocket; and proved experimentally what was theoretically known—that a rocket can propel itself in a vacuum.

Compared with some other forms of scientific experiment, rocket tests have been able to command but meager financial support. Yet, as in the long series of journeys toward the Poles, there is danger to spice the adventure. Max Valier, one of the pioneers of rocket development, was killed by the explosion of a tank of liquid oxygen; and, a few days ago, Reinhold Tiling, whose spectacular experiments had shown considerable success, met with a similar fate, together with two of his assistants. The rocket is still an uncontrollable device; and its explosive tendencies must be well regulated before it is a means of transportation. Yet this cannot be regarded as impossible.

The liquid-fuel rocket is the evident solution of the problem. Powder contains too little energy. The burden which rests upon the rocket, as on no other motor, is to carry its own oxygen, instead of drawing it from the air. And oxygen is from three-quarters to eight-ninths of the fuel load. It is a gas, which becomes a liquid only at about 300 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit; and that liquid generates a pressure which is tremendous as soon as it warms up a few degrees above that point. Yet the motor of the rocket must generate a heat of several thousand degrees, a short distance from the oxygen tank. In a rocket as big as a ship, this will not be true; but in a model rocket, it is one of the big problems. Several rockets, like that sent up last spring by the American Interplanetary Society at Staten Island, New York, have exploded in the air; and a loaded rocket is viewed by its operators with the caution, due a bomb whose fuse is lighted.

Yet the rocket experiments go on. There has never been any scientific problem so dangerous that no experimenters would tackle it.

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The World’s Safest Business

By G. Harry Stine
Viking-Aerobee Operations Engineer White Sands Proving Ground

AMATEUR rocketry is on the upswing in the United States. Many boys are building rockets today who would have been plane model fans a generation back. By rough count, there are approximately 100 amateur rocket societies in the U. S.—and no one knows how many young men building rockets.

When we get letters from amateur rocket men—most of them asking for detailed, specific information—we usually give three loud cheers and shake in our boots at the same time. It’s nice to know that there are people who are, unlike ourselves, interested in rockets not as a means of buying groceries and shoes for Junior.

But we shake in our boots because we know rocket flight testing is dangerous.

Professional rocketry today can truly be called the world’s safest business. In the 11 years of White Sands history, we have fired over 10,000 rockets and lost only two men—men who would still be with us if the rules had been followed. Working on the proving ground with highly toxic propellants, missiles going wild and explosions of bad rockets, we are actually safer than when driving to and from work. We follow the rules. If you are going to build and fly rockets, you must accept the responsibility which goes with it.

You must be willing to abide strictly by these rules of safety:
1. Rockets are high explosive devices, all of them. Treat them with great respect and caution at all times.

2. Do not expose rockets to heat over 125° F, or to shock of handling or dropping. Heat can ignite propellants. Shocks can crack solid propellant grains, exposing more burning area and so increasing burning rates and pressures inside rockets. Shocks can also damage any delicate devices in a rocket, misalign the rocket fins or structure, or actually crack vital parts or subject them to too much strain.

3. When mixing solid propellants, do so by diluting them with water and wear a shatterproof face shield. When working with liquid propellants, check with the manufacturer or a chemistry teacher to learn what protection you should have against their toxic effects.

4. When you fire a rocket, do so by electrical means. Keep the firing leads shorted or grounded both at the rocket and at the firing switch until the last possible moment. Make certain your are at a safe distance in case of an explosion. Do not use blasting caps for anything! Use a length of nichrome wire to heat up a small bit of black powder to give you a puff ball of flame for ignition. If you have a misfire with a rocket, put all safeties back on at once and do not approach the missile for at least an hour.

5. When you fire a rocket, do it far away from any building or inhabited area. Before shooting, obtain permission from the owner of the land to do so. Don’t fire in a wind, and always fire in a safe direction; “up” is not safe, so shoot at a slight angle at least.

6. Obtain the help and advice of somebody in your area who knows something about chemistry, physics, explosives, or science in general. Don’t go blundering by yourself. You won’t have trouble getting help for rockets are exciting devices! •

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How the World will End

Scientists who have been tracing the history of the moon declare that the reign of fire and brimstone which will herald the end of the earth will in all probability be brought about by the moon’s falling back upon the earth. The diagrams herewith illustrate the process which astronomers believe will destroy the world after thousands of years. At present the moon is retreating from the earth; the equator bulges slightly as shown by the exaggerated drawing in Figure 1. Lunar tides slow down the earth’s motion until eventually the two bodies will revolve around a common center of gravity. When this state of balance occurs, the attraction of the earth will slowly but surely draw the moon toward it, so that after millions of years some distant astronomer of another world will observe a brilliant white glow which will mark the reduction of earth and moon to a white-hot globe of gas.

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THE MOON AND THE SEX DRIVE

by Albert Abarbanel, Ph.D.

A discussion of theories about how the moon’s cycle affects the rise and fall of sex desire.

The moon has always played a prominent part in people’s beliefs about sex. Primitive tribes conduct elaborate fertility rites when the moon is full. The peasants of southern Germany, southern France and Spain believe that the best time to conceive a child is during a crescent moon. Police chiefs alert their sex squads for trouble when the moon is full.

Whatever the basis for these beliefs may be, there is no doubt that they have persisted with many variations through a great deal of history.

The Botocudo tribe of East Africa, for example, worship the moon as the giver of virility to men and fertility to women. Botocudo boys go through an elaborate circumcision ritual when they reach the age of puberty and are initiated into the mysteries of sex under the light of a full moon.

Botocudo brides expose themselves to the moon before marriage and pray to it for the power to give sexual satisfaction to their husbands.

Many tribes in Africa, Eskimos in Alaska, Greenlanders and Australian bushmen believe that sexual intercourse under a full moon always results in pregnancy. To guard against this, when it is not desired, the men rub saliva on the stomachs of the women just before the period of a full moon, a treatment which is supposed to prevent the stomach from swelling—in effect, an effort to prevent pregnancy.

Some natives believe that the moon itself is a virile force. Thus, certain Nigerian tribes are of the opinion that a woman can have a baby by the moon without any help from a male.

On the other hand, among North African tribes, the belief is that the moon gives women children by making the males vigorous and fertile. One curious legend has it that the Great Moon Mother sends the man in the moon to earth to impregnate women.

In some cases, notably among the Buriats of western Mongolia, young males cultivate their virility by indulging in homosexual orgies in the moonlight. No married males are permitted to participate, but a man who has been divorced because his wife was unable to bear children may join in the orgies in the hope that his next marriage will turn out to be more productive.

The Buriats also believe that children conceived when the moon is at its height will be stronger, handsomer and more talented than children conceived at other times.

This belief is not restricted to savage tribes. Even today, in the west of England, there is a popular rhyme that runs: “Over land and sea will rule The child begot when moon is full.”

And the Nandis of Central Africa believe that all royal babies, the sons and daughters of chiefs, are conceived during a full moon.

They carry this belief so far that when a royal baby is born with some physical or mental handicap, it is considered proof that the mother has been unfaithful to the husband and may be discarded without the husband’s having to return to her family any part of the dowry that came with her.

Many of these beliefs obviously have no basis in scientific possibilities. However, the influence of the moon cannot be ruled out altogether.

Some police experts believe that their records show a rise in the number of sex crimes when the moon is full.

They point to one study of the Detroit police records which showed a 23 per cent increase in sexual assaults in the full moon period as compared with the rest of the month.

They point also to the case of “The Moonlight Monster,” who terrorized northern Italy some time ago. This was the name given to Guido Zingerle, a 48-year-old peasant, who kidnapped farm girls, took them to his hideaway in the Tyrolean mountains, and raped and tortured them to death. Every one of Zingerle’s crimes was committed when the moon was full. Zingerle vividly described how, during a full moon, it was as though the blood boiled in his veins and beat with a stepped-up rhythm.

A German psychologist Bernhard Klausner kept records of the sexual activities of 28 males ranging in age from 19 to 50. Over a 3-year period he found that over 74 per cent of their sexual activity occurred when the moon was full.

Even more interesting was the discovery that for the older men in the group the percentage was higher; and in one case, that of a man of 46, sexual potency was completely dependent on the full moor. Without it, his virility declined to zero.

But all of this is merely suggestive —it is very far from being of a scope wide enough and careful enough to constitute any scientific proof.

The most obvious connection between the moon and sex functioning would seem to be the female monthly menstrual period. Many primitive tribes thought that this process was governed by the moon, and this belief is still held by many people.

However, Dr. Ashley Montagu points out (see Sexology, July, 1963, page 823) that the lunar month during which the moon goes through its phases is about 29% days long. On the other hand, the average menstrual cycle varies from 28 to 32 days, and even varies from month to month with each woman.

“In fact,” he writes, “irregularity in menstruation is more the rule than the exception, in contrast to the precise habits of the moon.” Thus, Dr. Montagu concludes, “phases of the moon have no more effect on women than do the big league baseball schedules.”

Still, scientists hesitate to dismiss the long-held belief in a possible connection between the moon and the moods of human beings. The massive gravitational pull of the moon that results in high and low tides, they say, may very well have some effect on the chemicals in the body.

The latest findings about conditions in space suggest that we may do well to keep an open mind on this question.

According to Sir Bernard Lovell— one of England’s most distinguished astronomers—changing conditions in space may well have an effect on man’s mentality.

In the past few years, he says, “some strange and inexplicable links appear to be emerging between lunar phases, rainfall, meteoric impact, magnetic storms and mental disturbances.”

He points to a study made by 3 American scientists, which found a significant connection between magnetic storms and admissions to 8 psychiatric hospitals in New York State between 1957 and 1961. He then goes on to declare: “It almost seems that we are moving through a series of scientific fantasies to a proof of the ancient belief in the connection between the moon and lunacy.”

—————————————
A psychotherapist and marriage counselor, Dr. Abarbanel was co-editor of “The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior” and co-author of “An Assault on Civilization” and “What Every Woman Should Know About Marriage.”

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TOEHOLD IN SPACE

Tiny moonlets, encircling our earth, might be used as jumping-off points for space travel.

By Stanley Carson

HOW many moons has the earth? If your answer is one, you may be wrong! Astronomers believe that there actually are one or several small satellites orbiting with tremendous speed between the earth and the moon.

If the predictions of our astronomers are correct, and there are a number of small moons circling the earth at short distances, then space travel may become a reality many more years sooner than is anticipated. For the moonlets which our government is now searching for can be used as ready-made stations in space. It would not be necessary for rocket ships to carry thousands of tons of structural material into space to construct an artificial satellite. The foundation for man’s first celestial outposts would be ready and waiting and only a minimum of materials for living and working quarters would be necessary.

The Department of Defense has decided that the possibility of moonlets existing in space between the earth and the moon is sufficient to warrant an immediate astronomical survey in an attempt to locate the exact position of these small bodies. A telescopic search is now being made for the government by Drs. Clyde Tombaugh and Lincoln La Paz, directors of the Institute of Meteritics of the University of New Mexico.

In a recent interview Dr. La Paz said that the United States had “better get on the ball quickly” if it is not already working on a station in space. He believes that if the search for a small, nearby moonlet is successful it can be built up as an outpost in space.

“Using such natural stations,” said Dr. La Paz. “would save many billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money which would otherwise have to be spent building an artificial satellite vehicle.”

Many astronomers and scientists believe the chances of eventually finding the moonlets are good. It has been pointed out that while the earth has only one known satellite—the familiar moon—other planets have from two to eleven small bodies as moons and that many more probably exist, but have not been seen in telescopes.

Mars, for example, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos. Compared to the earth’s moon with a diameter of 2,163 miles, the two tiny satellites of Mars can hardly be classed as moons, but rather fit into the smaller category of moonlets. Phobos, 5,800 miles from the planet, is only 10 miles in diameter and Deimos, 14,600 miles from Mars, is but five miles in diameter!

With its eleven moons, Jupiter is a perfect example of a solar system in miniature.

Its satellites range from moonlets an insignificant 15 miles in diameter to two great bodies, Ganymede and Callisto, each 3,200 miles in diameter. The closest moon of Jupiter is only 112,600 miles from the monster planet and the most distant orbit is 14,880,000 miles away.

Space abounds with smaller bodies variously described as planetoids and asteroids. Ceres is the largest known of these wandering nomads of the solar system and is 480 miles in diameter. The planetoid Hermes, one mile in diameter and with a mass of three billion tons, can come as close to the earth as 220,000 miles—closer than our moon. The majority of the “minor planets,” however, are less than 50 miles in diameter. At least 1,500 are charted and their orbits known.

There is good reason to believe, therefore, that the earth also may be the mother world of one or a group of small moonlets. These may circle our planet anywhere from 1,000 to 200,000 miles out in space though they are probably quite close to the earth, which accounts for their not having been sighted before.

According to Dr. C. M. Clemence, director of the Nautical Almanac Office of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, the chances are “very good” that there are one or more small satellites between the earth and the moon.

Such objects will be extremely difficult to find, Dr. Clemence believes. They would have become disastrous meteorites eons ago except that they fell into an orbit about the earth.

Dr. Clemence stated that the speed of the tiny moons would depend upon their distance from the earth. A satellite 1,000 miles in space would whip around the planet in less than two and one half hours, which is one good reason why they have never been spotted. They would be moving too fast to be caught on the usual photographic plates.

Another reason why the moonlets have not yet been sighted, explains Dr. Clemence, is that most of the time they are in the earth’s shadow and therefore do not shine. Every now and then, however, the moonlet in its orbit will whirl beyond the shadow of the earth for a short period of time and may be seen visually. Dr. Clemence believes that one way to track the moonlets is to move the camera at the same speed as the satellite (as it would be seen) would flash through the sky.

Even if the search is successful, Dr. Clemence believes the project will require at least two to three years for completion.

Other astronomers do not feel quite so keenly about the chances of discovering the elusive moonlets. According to Dr. Hugh S. Rice (for whom the Rice Asteroid is named), Research Consultant, Astronomy, The Hayden Planetarium, it is definitely possible that the moonlets do circle the earth, but it is also improbable that we shall be successful in our quest. Dr. Rice points out, and with good reason, that sky observation and study have been conducted for many years. “To my knowledge,” Dr. Rice stated, “our observations have not detected any bodies orbiting about the earth other than the moon.”

The standard method of celestial study and photography is to use an astrograph. This instrument consists of a telescope with a camera plate attached to photograph certain areas of sky. Usually the astrograph is set so that it will follow exactly the motions of the stars as they “swing about the heavens” during the night hours.

Actually, of course, the astrograph’s movement is so governed that it does not turn-with the earth as it rotates. In this fashion, the developed photographic plates will show the distant stars as fixed circles of light. Smaller bodies within the solar system, such as asteroids or moonlets, will appear as streaks of light.

The planetoid Ceres was discovered in this manner, as was the outermost planet, Pluto.

Many asteroids approaching close to the earth are detected in this fashion, although the majority seem to have been discovered by accident. The astronomers, intent upon photographic scrutiny of the stars, have found the tracks of the asteroids across the developed film.

The problem in searching for the moonlets is twofold. Since they are presumed to orbit closely around the planet, as Dr. Clemence pointed out, they are subject to illumination by the sun only during short periods of time. It is’also possible that astronomers have already tracked a moonlet, but were led to believe that what appeared on their photographic plates was a meteor trail.

A moonlet 1,000 miles beyond the earth, for example, must have an orbital velocity of approximately 17,000 miles per hour. That means that if the moonlet was exposed to a lengthy time exposure, it would show as a brilliant streak and could certainly be assumed to have been the passage of a “shooting star.”

Dr. Rice does not believe that the astro-graph, despite its long and successful use in the past, is particularly well suited for the moonlet search. He points out that its angle of view is very narrow and that the astrograph is designed to take large images in very small areas of sky. Astrographic study for moonlets, therefore, would be a long and tedious task.

“There is another method of photographic observation of the sky,” Dr. Rice added, “in which the astrograph is employed to take time exposures. The stare are allowed to appear in the pictures as streaks of light. A deviation from this ‘light streaking’ will indicate another type of celestial body.”

Astronomical science, of course, has other tools at its disposal. Radio detection of small meteors and meteor swarms, during daylight and darkness, possibly can be adapted to the moonlet search. New methods developed during the last several years employ radio waves as “Jacob’s Ladders” to the extreme upper atmosphere. These radio investigations have revealed that the earth is bombarded by a barrage of 10,000 to 100,000 meteoric dust motes every second.

After a radio wave study of 13,000 individual meteors, scientists determined through radio measurements that these celestial bullets travel a speed of from 10 to 45 miles a second.

Radio astronomy methods have permitted scientists to discover and track meteors with an efficiency 100 times greater than that possible through visual observation by telescope. The most important fact revealed by the radio astronomy work is that great clusters of meteoric material move in specific orbits in space. These regularly visit the planets, each time depositing showers of iron and stone particles upon the various worlds.

It is reasonable to assume that the radio astronomy methods, as well as radar detection, can be adapted to the search for moonlets.

Whatever the methods employed, the armed forces appear determined to exhaust the possibilities of the moonlets in space. As Dr. La Paz stated, the moonlet orbiting about the earth is a natural base for a scientific space station upon which we could establish living and working quarters for the first spacemen. The problems of space travel are manyfold and one of the most extensive of all the projects envisioned for the conquest of space is the incredible task of constructing an artificial satellite in an orbit about the earth.

It has been anticipated that such a venture would require many millions of tons of rocket fuel, the passage of many years, billions of dollars, and would impose a strain on the nation’s economy. A moonlet would eliminate the necessity for transporting hundreds of tons of structural members and materials for basic living and working quarters, since the essential structures for supporting life could be erected directly on the moonlet surface.

Of course we still have the problems of how to catch the moonlets when and if we do find them, how we will counteract the pull of gravity on the moonlets themselves, what we will eat, how we will breathe, etc., but our scientists are already hard at work, trying to solve such problems and they have made great strides indeed. It is entirely possible that by the time the tiny satellites are finally spotted and properly charted we will already have amassed enough technical information and built enough equipment to take space travel out of the realm of science fiction and projection and plunge it like a flaming sword into the pulsating domain of reality.

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Invasion Base on the Moon

“The first nation to establish a lunar military outpost will rule the earth” says Willy Ley, expert in rocket research.

THE man in the moon may plot the attack that will open World War III. For the man in the moon will be a powerful “spy in the sky” rocketed to the earth’s satellite by the aggressor nation to prepare the way for an all-out assault to conquer the world.

Soon after a 20th-century Columbus pilots his rocket to the moon, the nation that sent him there will have a lunar base that will expose any spot on earth to celestial spying and sudden rocket invasion.

The moon’s terrain, scarred with countless craters, has thousands of excellent sites for offensive bases. The aggressor who sets up the first interplanetary outpost on the moon can dominate not only the world but the entire solar system.

As the moon-bound rocket zooms out of the world, the space explorer will see that the earth has become a great display window for him. In a single historic flight he will have eliminated from the vocabulary of the world’s nations the term “military security.”

From the barren lunar wasteland or towering volcano to which he anchors his rocket he will focus high-powered telescopic lenses on the earth. These lenses will be 5 times more powerful on the moon than on earth, since the moon has no atmosphere to limit magnification. Thus, he will be able to observe, at one time, great factories operating in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. As the earth rotates on its axis, he will see similar activity in London, in Moscow and in Tokyo. The new man in the moon will be able to watch as each nation works on its railroads, ports or factories—or stockpiles of atom bombs for war.

The pioneers who plan to build a base on the moon won’t find their task too tough, even on the basis of what we know today about conditions there.

Like the earth, the moon has a day and night. One complete night-and-day cycle on the moon, however, lasts a month. Fourteen earth days of cold night anywhere on the moon follow a similar period of intense heat when that same part of the moon’s surface is exposed to the sun. During a “moon day,” the great satellite’s surface is heated to a temperature of 392 degrees. “Moon nights” will approach absolute zero in coldness.

As a result of these extremes of temperature, the moon pioneers will find its surface covered with rock debris, chips and dust, since no rock can stand such sudden heat changes without cracking. And since there is no air on the moon, the moon men will find no surface water.

The base builders, then, will face a double problem of maintaining an even temperature and providing themselves with air and water.

By going underground they will solve the temperature problem, since the extremes of temperature occasioned by the month-long lunar cycle are strictly surface phenomena. The first expedition to the moon will look for a large, deep cave, because the temperature below the surface debris, although probably cold, will be even. If the moon men find no natural cave, they can make an artificial one by tunneling about 500 feet into a mountain.

Before the earthmen can solve any problems on the moon, however, they will have to set up an atomic pile; this will be the key to their permanency on the moon. The atomic pile will produce the heat, and this, in turn, will produce the steam which will run any construction equipment needed. And eventually the pile will produce the air and the water by which the moon pioneers will live.

While the moon men build their atomic engines, they will live on the rocket ship that brought them to the moon, and use a supply of air and water from the earth. Space suits, with airtight joints. Plexiglas head bubbles and built-in heating units will enable them to work away from their ship on the lunar terrain.

The cave shelter will be sealed off by an airlock, a set of two airtight doors with a space between them. In this way, only the air in the space between the two doors will be lost each time someone enters or leaves.

Additional fresh air will be made right on the moon. Since oxygen atoms are locked in most rock compounds, decomposing the rock will liberate breathable oxygen. Hydrogen— needed to combine with oxygen to form water—also is hidden in many minerals. These elements can be liberated from their rocky prisons by energy from the atomic pile, which produces this energy continuously by transforming heavy atoms into lighter atoms. With this unlimited atomic energy, many of the necessities of life can be extracted from the rocks forming the mountains of the moon.

With the cave supplied with air and water, the moon men will draw further on their atomic pile for heat and light, by steam and steam turbine, and electric generator.

The lamps which light the cave will be Vitamin-D-producing sun lamps capable of supporting plant life. Since the crushed rock of the moon’s surface will be useless as soil, hydroponic gardens will produce tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and other vegetables. The breath of the men in the cave will supply the carbon dioxide necessary for these plants. The plants, in turn, will give off oxygen.

A moon crater will make a natural base for invasion rockets. The high, circular rim of the crater will act as a bunker against external bomb blasts, and the upthrust of the lava rock in the center will provide an elevated platform for a control dome.

Almost impossible to spot among the maze of surrounding pits, the crater is easy to guard against ground invasion and can be destroyed only by a direct atom-bomb hit—a practically impossible feat from our atmosphere-blinded earth.

The rocket-base construction will be comparatively simple. It will only be necessary to build a ring of concrete launching pits and connecting service roads, easily laid on the level pumice that fills the crater.

Thus, an atomic pile and a few simple elements are all that will be required for an invasion base on the moon, once the interplanetary explorer “stakes” the earth’s satellite for his country. When this happens, the moon may lose its “June-spoon” romance.

Then it will set the scene for world-shattering war, unless earthmen meanwhile find peaceful means of settling their disputes. •

I love the idea of crowdsourcing the task of actually finding the satellite once its in orbit to an army of amateur astronomers.

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The Artificial Satellite as a Research Instrument

Its pay load of 10 pounds will telemeter information about conditions at the edge of space. When its batteries have run down, we can still learn much by observing its flight

by James A. Van Allen

Most persons interested in space travel will be willing to wait until the second or third spaceship has made it to the moon and back before booking their reservations. The artificial earth satellites are another story. If all goes well, the first of them will be on orbit by early 1958, during the International Geophysical Year. Already there is a long waiting list of research projects for these first satellites. Unhappily they will have little space for research apparatus. Only about half of their 20-pound weight can be devoted to instruments for recording and reporting physical conditions at the edge of outer space.

The National Academy of Sciences and the Defense Department have announced that they plan to make enough launching attempts to establish at least one satellite in a durable orbit: there may be 12 such attempts during the I.G.Y.

Each successful flight should vastly enrich our knowledge of the earth and its environment in space. Much has been learned during the past 10 years by means of high-altitude research rockets, and some 200 such rockets will be fired during the I.G.Y. But a rocket flight lasts only a few short minutes. By comparison, a satellite traveling around the earth for days or months will be a semipermanent observatory. From it we can undertake direct and more or less continuous monitoring of the intensities of arriving radiations which are absorbed and obscured by the protecting blanket of the atmosphere. We can get a count and a spectrum of the sizes of the micrometeorites that the earth sweeps up on its orbit. The round-the-world travels of the satellite will make possible surveys of the outer reaches of the geomagnetic field and the cloud cover over vast areas of the earth below. These and other satellite observations can be correlated with observations from the ground to establish more clearly the connection between events inside and outside our atmosphere.

Even without instruments a satellite can be a useful research tool. When conditions are right, against a twilight sky, it will be visible to the naked eye as a very faint and fast-moving “star”—about as dim as the faintest star an acute human eye can see. The direction and speed of its flight can be plotted by sky cameras and by observers equipped with low-power telescopes and binoculars. The variation of its velocity and the perturbations of its orbit will yield precise information about the density of the upper reaches of atmosphere and about the true shape of the earth and the distribution of its mass within. Fixes taken on its position from observatories around the globe will locate reference points on different continents with great precision and reduce present errors in the world map.

The laws of physics set certain inexorable limits on the design and behavior of a satellite. In the first place, to hold an orbit around the earth the satellite will have to have a velocity of at least five miles per second. Man has not yet succeeded in hurling any sizeable object at this velocity. At the present stage in the art of rocketry, the velocity requirement sharply restricts the mass of the satellite. To get a 20-pound object up to orbital velocity at sufficient altitude above the earth to free it from the drag of the atmosphere will require a launching rocket weighing 22,000 pounds. It might seem that with a propulsion system of this size a few extra tens of pounds of payload would make little difference. But to deliver a 40-pound satellite on the same orbit would require a propulsion system weighing 44,000 pounds.

The choice of orbit is likewise restricted. It is not possible, for example, to have a satellite describe a halo over the globe around, say, the Arctic Circle.

The orbit must lie in a plane through the center of the earth. For some purposes a perfectly circular orbit would be ideal, but since perfect directional control of the satellite is impossible, the actual orbits will be mildly elliptical in shape, with the center of the earth at one of the two mathematical foci. Here the question of altitude becomes important. The lifetime of a satellite is determined by the atmospheric resistance it encounters. At 300 miles, the projected launching altitude, it will find the atmosphere about as thin as that in a laboratory vacuum. On an elliptical orbit, however, it will travel through lower altitudes during part of its flight. Air resistance there will slow the satellite so that it will spiral inward to the denser regions where friction will finally burn it up. Because knowledge of atmospheric density at high altitudes is so uncertain, we cannot make firm predictions about the life expectancy of satellites. The objective for the first satellite is an orbit which will take it no closer than 200 miles from the earth’s surface at perigee and no farther than 1,500 miles at apogee. Estimates of its lifetime in such an orbit range from a few weeks to a year.

For convenience of observation, among other reasons, the first satellites will be set on orbit at a 40-degree angle to the Equator. This orbit will keep them circulating overhead in a zone between the 40th latitudes north and south. At the orbital velocity of 18,000 miles per hour, a satellite will circle the earth in about 100 minutes, or 14 to 16 times per day. The eastward rotation of the earth will cause its path to describe a sinusoidal curve around the Equator. The equatorial bulge of the earth, and detailed mass irregularities such as mountain ranges, will produce perturbations of the satellite’s orbit [see diagram at bottom of page 45].

Over a sufficiently long time the satellite will come at least once within sighting distance of everyone within the orbital zone, covering some 125 million square miles of the earth’s surface. It will be sighted most frequently near northern and southern boundaries of the zone. To a casual observer the arrivals of the satellite overhead may appear quite capricious. It will cross the sky at different speeds, at different altitudes and in different directions.

One of the reasons for choosing a lateral orbit around the earth is to take advantage of the earth’s rotation to help launch the satellite. The plan is to launch the objects from Cape Canaveral, Fla., toward the east over the Atlantic Ocean. The earth’s eastward rotation will add, by a kind of slingshot effect, to the velocity given the satellite by the rockets. Every bit of velocity is precious. A velocity of 18,000 miles per hour and an altitude of 300 miles represent an enormous advance over the present record of 6,000 miles per hour and 250 miles established in 1949 by a two-stage rocket. The vehicle that is to accomplish this is a three-stage 72-foot finless rocket [see lower diagram on the preceding two pages].

No less remarkable than this achievement in rocketry will be the feat of control engineering that will carry out the flight plan. The vehicle will be self-guided by an intricate control system housed in the second stage. This system will take command on the launching platform. It will time the ignition and the separation of the spent rockets, and it will direct the jets of the gimbal-mounted motors of the first- and second-stage rockets to swing the vehicle smoothly from its initial vertical trajectory onto a course parallel with the earth’s surface [see upper diagram on preceding pages]. Just before it ignites the third stage, it will fire a pinwheel array of jets which will set the vehicle rotating on its long axis. The third stage, spinning at several revolutions per second, will then streak away in stable flight on the orbit. The shell of this rocket might itself serve as a satellite, without instruments. If it carries an instrument-loaded “bird,” the final propulsion shell and the bird will separate at a pretimed moment. In that case we shall have two companion satellites, for the third-stage shell as well as the bird will continue on orbit. The instrument-carrying satellite may be a sphere, a cylinder or some other shape; there is even a possibility that it may be made inflatable, to improve its visibility.

The launching, if all goes well, will set the stage for the nerve-wracking task of the first sighting of the satellite. Down-range observation of the departing rocket will predict the arrival of the satellite over a given observation point with an error of no less than six minutes and several hundred miles. There may well be doubt that the object is actually in a durable orbit. The number of fully equipped optical observatories will be limited. Their coverage will have to be extended by mobilizing amateur observers all over the world and assigning them systematically plotted areas of sky. If the satellite is not sighted on its first time around, the game of sighting it will assume constantly greater uncertainty. It is needless to enlarge on the haunting fear that a satellite might be on orbit and yet escape detection.

Such a possibility dictates that the first satellites be equipped with a low-power radio transmitter even if they carry no other instruments. A radio beacon and storage batteries to give it several weeks of life can be installed at a cost of about one pound in weight. Its signal can be used to report observations as well as for location. To pick up the signals, an array of tracking stations will be located along the 75th meridian from Washington, D.C., to Santiago, Chile. The satellite will have to pass through this picket fence every time around. Additional stations will be located elsewhere around the globe. Some of them may be in the U.S.S.R., which recently agreed to tune its satellites to the same radio frequencies as ours, and in China. Coverage of the sky by these stations will be extended by enlisting radio hams to monitor the satellites’ frequency, especially during the critical first trip around the earth and during the dying phase.

Once the satellite has been sighted and its first few orbits plotted, prediction of its future orbits can be made with increasing precision. The National Academy of Sciences is establishing special computation laboratories in Cambridge, Mass., and Washington. Their bulletins will alert the observers and the public at large to the satellite’s appearances in the sky at ideal seeing times over observatories and centers of population.

The primary optical observations will be conducted from 12 specially equipped stations. Each will have a 20-inch Schmidt sky camera, capable of registering the image of a 15-inch sphere at 1,000 miles or a three-foot sphere at the distance of the moon. They will take a series of exposures of each passage on strip film. On these pictures the satellite can be located within a minute or two of arc in the sky and within milliseconds in m time. Such precision will make it possible to locate observing stations relative to one another and to the center of the earth to an accuracy of 30 or 50 feet. A dozen such fixes will allow geographers to connect the maps of the continents with new accuracy and will help to establish the shape of the earth. The perturbations of the orbit, observed with the same precision, will give important information about the shape and structure of the earth. The rate of spiraling caused by atmospheric drag will provide an extremely sensitive measurement of atmospheric density as a function both of latitude and altitude.

In the last few revolutions before the satellite disintegrates, orbital changes are likely to be so rapid as to evade prediction and hence observation by the widely scattered “official” stations. The picture of what happens then will have to come from the stop watches, radio receivers and binoculars of amateurs.

All the information recorded by on-board instruments of the early satellites will have to be transmitted by radio, for we cannot expect to recover the instruments after the flight. As a practical matter, to avoid the need for a vast number of receiving stations around the globe, messages will be taken from the low-power satellite transmitters as they pass over a picket fence of receivers after circling the earth. This will require storage of the instrumental observations by some memory device in the satellite. A simple type of memory would be a circuit storing the minimum and maximum readings of a given instrument during a trip. Readings from a number of instruments can be stored in detail with a more elaborate device, such as magnetic tape, but at greater cost in weight. The readout will be triggered by radio command. The command frequency will be kept secret in order to protect the readings and the power supply from dissipation by kibitzers.

Power supply is a knotty problem. Chemical storage batteries appear to be the simplest and most reliable solution for short-life satellites. The best commercial batteries yield about 45 watt-hours per pound. For operation over periods longer than a few weeks we shall have to look to new devices such as solar batteries or radioactive cells. A system which uses several solar batteries to trickle-charge a small storage battery is now being developed by the U. S. Army Signal Corps. This system will provide indefinitely about one fourth of a watt per pound of total weight; during its exposure to the sun it will store a small surplus of energy to supply power for the half-hour or so on each trip when the satellite is on the dark side of the earth.

In the successive passages from the sunlit to the shady side of the earth the outer skin of the satellite will go through marked variations in temperature—from about 100 degrees Fahrenheit to about 70 degrees below zero. It will be necessary to protect the instruments inside from these extremes. By sagacious insulation it should be possible to hold the cycle within the reasonable limits of 40 and 70 degrees.

What instruments shall we put in the satellite observatory? There are a number of good possibilities for the few flights we shall have available. With a simple photocell installed in the satellite we could, for example, make a detailed survey of the cloud cover over large areas of the earth. As the spinning satellite circled the globe, the photocell would alternately look out into space and down at the earth, making a detailed survey of reflected light from points below it. The reflected radiation would be a reliable index of the cloud cover. A small microphone could record the number and momentum of the micrometeorites that beat on the metal skin of the satellite. To measure the density in space of microscopic dust particles, we might paint on the surface a simple stripe of radioactive material, whose erosion would record the rain of particles. Among the interesting questions these observations might settle would be whether micrometeorites play any part in generating the air glow in our upper atmosphere and in creating the noctilucent clouds.

High on the list of things to be clone is a survey of the outer reaches of the ionosphere, the electrified region which is so important to all long-range radio communication on the earth. A satellite should also give us information about the density of electrons in space in the near vicinity of our planet. Another important topic for investigation is the earth’s magnetic field. This might be surveyed with a sensitive, miniaturized magnetometer especially designed for installation in a satellite.

But at the very top of the list of subjects that scientists want to study are the sun’s short-wave radiations and cosmic rays. During 1957-58 there will be a sun-spot maximum bringing heavy fluctuations in both types of radiation. This will provide ideal opportunities for observation of their interactions with the earth’s upper atmosphere. Measurement of ultraviolet radiation and soft X-rays from the sun would illuminate their role in the formation and behavior of the electrically charged layers of the ionosphere. An ionization chamber and photon counters in a satellite could record the varying intensity of this radiation and help determine its relation to flares on the sun. A Geiger counter hooked up to a magnetic tape memory could make corresponding measurements for cosmic rays. During quiet periods the same instrumentation could survey the rays’ geographical distribution above our atmosphere. Such a survey would test the traditional theory that the earth’s magnetic field controls the arrival of cosmic rays against the new notion that their trajectories are shaped by magnetic fields elsewhere in the interplanetary region. An apparatus for cosmic-ray observations in satellites is being developed by George Ludwig and the writer at the University of Iowa [see lower diagram on the opposite page].

It is clear that there is more work to be done than the first satellites can handle. It is equally clear that the Geophysical Year will be only the beginning of this adventure. After the first satellites have proved their usefulness, we can confidently predict that others will be abundantly available to science in the years to follow.

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Getting a Line on the Aurora

ON A clear, moonless night a diffuse glow or a well-defined arch of pale pearly light is seen low over the northern horizon. Gradually the light grows brighter and presently long beams shoot up in great fan-like sheaves. In ghostly procession they shift back and forth across the sky. At times they shake with a tremulous motion, and again rapid flashes or pulsations of light roll up toward the zenith. Such is a typical display of the aurora, or northern lights, as beheld from middle latitudes of the north temperate zone.

These weird exhibitions of nature’s fireworks have been the subject of many superstitious beliefs. The Norsemen fancied them to be the Valkyries, in flashing armor, riding through the night. The rare displays seen in low latitudes inspired the tales of phantom armies warring in the sky that abound in ancient and mediaeval chronicles.

What is the aurora? And where is it? Let us answer the second of these questions first.

It is common to think of an auroral display as a local event—like a thunderstorm, for example, and to regard the displays seen at different places on any one night as separate and distinct “auroras.” This conception is erroneous. If we could view the earth from some point several hundred miles out in space, we should see that the aurora forms two semi-permanent belts encircling the polar regions of both hemispheres. That of the northern hemisphere is the aurora borealis, and that of the southern, the aurora australis.

Brilliant and widespread displays of aurora occur chiefly at times when the sun is in a state of great turmoil, as shown by the presence of many sunspots and great “prominences” of incandescent gas shot out from the solar atmosphere. These displays are also accompanied by so-called magnetic storms on earth, and interfere with the operation of telegraph lines and radio.

The best answer science is able to give at present to the question “What is the aurora?” is that this phenomenon is a glow discharge of electricity through the rarefied gases of the upper atmosphere, more or less similar to the glows seen in neon tubes, mercury-vapor lamps and the like. The exciting cause of the discharge is supposed to be the bombardment of the atmosphere by electrified particles from the sun.

The solar particles, on approaching the earth, follow the magnetic “lines of force surrounding the earth” which eventually bring them down through the atmosphere in two belts surrounding the magnetic poles. These are the auroral belts.

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Static from the Stars

Because a radio ham heard strange sky noises, we may get better FM and television—and learn more about our universe.

By Herbert Yahraes

Drawings by Ray Pioch WHEN young Grote Reber was a high school sophomore, he operated 9GFZ in Wheaton, Ill., and tacked so many recognition—QSL—cards to his bedroom walls that the plaster cracked and his parents cracked down. When not communicating with El Paso, Arequipa, Capetown, Prague, and other points, he designed equipment to communicate with them even better. Nobody who knew him then will be surprised to learn that he is still in radio—listening not to the chatter of hams, but to mysterious and bothersome radio waves that come from the heart of the Milky Way.

Reber—the first e is long, as in receiver— has designed and built a huge radio mirror that traps radio waves from the stars the same way that an ordinary telescope mirror traps light waves. The radio waves can be used for the same job—to explore the universe. After 10 years of experimenting with the mirror in his family’s yard in Wheaton, where the ignition system of every passing automobile broke into the stellar broadcasts, Reber has sold it to the United States Bureau of Standards and has signed on to operate it as one of the Bureau’s top radio physicists. Now, in a big, quiet field in Virginia, 40 miles west of Washington, the 35-year old former ham is ready to work full time decoding the messages from space.

The Bureau expects these messages to help answer at least one question of immediate, practical importance: Where shall FM and television stations be located? They may also influence the design of new high-frequency equipment. For Reber’s telescope already has shown that radiation from the great beyond comes in on the same frequencies as those used for FM, television, and radar. It is, in short, cosmic static, and on these frequencies it can be as upsetting as ordinary thunderstorm static on the much lower home-broadcast band.

Military Use Foreseen Furthermore, Reber’s big mirror may have some bearing on any future war. During World War I, pilots commonly hid in the sun, either to escape enemy planes or to pounce unexpectedly upon them. Radar spoiled that tactic in World War II. But static comes from the sun as well as the stars, and sometimes floods the atmosphere with strong radio waves. If these great outbursts can be predicted—and Reber’s technique makes it possible to study them more carefully than ever before—planes will be able to zip into an enemy’s territory while his radar is temporarily jammed.

Neither Reber nor anyone else at the Bureau even hints that this possibility had anything to do with his being hired, but it is a fact that the armed services supply the money for many a radio research project, including this one.

Beyond these practical aspects, the radio telescope is expected to help chart the shape and size of the Milky Way, which is our part of the universe; to probe into the mechanism of the sun; and to identify cosmic material too dark to be analyzed by the ordinary spectroscope.

“Telescope of Tomorrow”

It is one of the developments Dr. Otto Struve had in mind when he declared recently that “electronics will dominate the next 50 years in astronomy much as photography dominated in the past 50 years.” Dr. Struve, eminent astronomer and honorary director of Yerkes Observatory, describes Reber’s apparatus as the “telescope of tomorrow” and believes that because of it and other new electronic devices “the construction of larger telescopes may no longer be the primary concern of the astronomer.”

Reber’s apparatus looks like a gigantic parasol made of glistening sheet iron. This mirror captures electromagnetic energy the same way the mirror of an ordinary reflecting telescope captures light, and then focuses it on a drum 20 feet above the mirror’s center.

Inside the drum are a pair of cone antennas, which convert the stellar radiation into alternating current. This is fed from the cone tips to a five-stage amplifier and then rectified. The resulting direct-current voltage passes into a recorder, which charts its intensity.

Sweeps Out Hath in Sky Just as in other big telescopes, the mirror is mounted on an east-west axis so it Can be pointed to an angle of declination between minus 32.5 degrees and plus 90 degrees along the north-south meridian. As the earth rotates, the telescope sweeps out a path in the sky along the angle the observer has chosen.

Down in ^he housing at the base of the telescope, a pen automatically draws a line on a strip of paper—just as in the machines used to record electric waves from the heart or the brain. The chart moves six inches an hour. The line is straight until radio waves from outer space are intercepted; then it moves up, the height of the move measuring the intensity of the radiation.

People who don’t know anything about radio, except that if they dial 770 they get WJZ, often ask Reber, What do you hear from the stars? The tall, slim physicist grins and says he doesn’t hear a thing. He points out that radio waves themselves are not sound: they are electromagnetic energy. They can be turned into sound, all right, or they can be used to draw lines on a chart. “If you want to get the Rose Bowl or a performance of Carmen,” he says, “it’s sensible to turn them into sound; if you want to study the universe, it’s sensible to let them draw lines.”

Once in a while, though, Reber does plug in a headset. What he gets is pretty disappointing. “The music of the spheres,” he says, “is nothing but a hiss.”

The sun’s basic message is also a hiss, but riding on top of it, as disturbances flare up in the solar atmosphere, come sudden puffing and swishing noises. These may last only a second or less, or they may overlap, giving rise to a grinding sound. That’s when a television picture is likely to get the heebie jeebies.”

This difference between solar and stellar noise is .one of the reasons Reber doubts that the two phenomena have exactly the same cause. Another is the fact that the sun and the Milky Way come in with the same intensity on one frequency but with widely varying intensities on others. If the cause were the same, he says, we would not expect the radiation to be of the same strength since, after all, the sun is much closer than the Milky Way. But we would expect the ratio of intensity to be uniform, no matter what frequency the waves came in on. However, it isn’t.

Reber has been tuning in the heavens for 10 years, but, until recently, he was unable to give full time to the job or use certain refinements in his mechanical and electronic equipment. What started him off was a series of scientific reports by Karl G. Jansky, of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, that were published in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers. The first of these appeared in 1932 when Reber was studying at the Armour Institute of Technology. Jansky had set up a rotating an- tenna at Holmdel, N. J., to study the direction and intensity of ordinary static and had been surprised to find himself recording not two kinds of static but three. The first was from local thunderstorms, the second from distant thunderstorms. With scientific caution he described the third kind as “a steady hiss-type static of unknown origin.” He thought at first that it was coming from the sun but later concluded that the Milky Way was generating most of it.

Years of Research Ahead Out in Illinois the young student, Reber, sought the answers to questions posed by Jansky’s findings from physicists and mathematicians at the University of Chicago. They couldn’t satisfy him. And when Reber proposed to make the subject his research project, they pointed out that he might have to work on it 10 years. “Universities,” he says today, “are geared to get you a Ph.D. in three.”

So Reber took a job and plunged into weekend and night-long research on his own. His goal was equipment sensitive enough to determine just where the heavenly radio noise was coming from and how strongly. He kept thinking about ordinary telescopes. Why not build one for radio waves, using a big disk as its mirror and an antenna as its “eyepiece?”

The mirror was fairly easy to make. He bolted together nine pie slices of sheet iron for the middle of it, and added 36 lengths around the circumference. He fastened it to wooden ribs with screws.

The electronic equipment, particularly the amplifier, was tougher. He tried out a frequency of 3,300 megacycles. He got nothing, and he got nothing on 910. At these extremely high frequencies his original apparatus was too insensitive to pick up the waves from space.

Finally Makes Contact He kept trying. “You know how it is,” he says. “You start off cheaply and you keep figuring that if you spend just a little more you may get somewhere.” What Reber spent would have bought him three automobiles.

One bright midnight in October of 1938, 15 months after he had completed his first model, he pointed his telescope at the Milky Way and then hurried into the cellar of his home to watch a little meter he had rigged up. It looked like the speedometer of an automobile. The frequency was 160 mc. As he watched, the needle slowly rose from the base line. The young engineer plugged in a headset. From the direction of the constellation Sagittarius came a hiss.

Eventually, Reber could afford an automatic recorder to. take down the stellar broadcasts, but in those early days he had to rely on the meter. Night after night he would take readings—every minute, beginning at midnight. He couldn’t get accurate results before then because the Reber home was only two and a half blocks from the railroad station and a block from a parking lot, and every time a car passed he could hear all its spark plugs popping. Even after midnight he got interference from ignition systems and electric switches. He made his readings every minute on the minute until six in the morning; then he would grab a couple of hours’ sleep and drive into Chicago to design electronic equipment, first for Stewart Warner and then for Belmont.

At first the neighbors pestered him with questions about that big shiny “shaving mirror” perched high above the rhubarb patch in the yard, but after a while Reber could tell when there were strangers in town because only strangers would stop to look.

The automatic recorder was the answer to Rebel’s need for more sleep. It also enabled him to chart the radiation more accurately. The waves didn’t come from every part of the sky, nor were they of uniform intensity. Reber would make several charts of each angle of declination under study-one chart a night—and then plot them on a globe representing the sky of the northern hemisphere.

Such studies may explain the nature of the Milky Way. Classification of the Milky Way as a type of spiral nebula, says Dr. Bart J. Bok of the Harvard College Observatory, is one of the outstanding problems confronting astrophysicists. They’ve been , stymied so far, partly because we are inside this great galaxy—like a bug in a watch . case—and so can’t get a good look at it, and partly because some of the sections we can look at are obscured by huge, dark clouds of gas and cosmic dust.

Here’s where the radio telescope comes in. Rebel’s work indicates that the greatest source of radiation is in the direction of the Milky Way constellation of Sagittarius, or the Archer. Perhaps, then, this is the center of the nebula, 10,000 light years away. Other main sources are in the direction of Cygnus, or the Swan; Cassiopeia, which forms the big W; and Canis Major, where the Dog Star is. Perhaps these are the arms of the spiral.

More Observations Needed Many more observations must be made before the picture becomes clear. Fortunately, at the Bureau of Standards Reber can work a lot faster. His “telescope of tomorrow” is now mounted on a motor-driven turntable so that it can sweep a path along one angle of declination in a few minutes. Now he can make as many charts in two J weeks as he used to make in a year.

The offer from the Bureau of Standards came just as Reber was getting discouraged. Wheaton was a lovely town, but it had too many automobiles. Their ignition systems scrawled over his charts at night, and daytimes, when he tuned in the sun, they made a record that looked like a fringe of hair standing straight up around a bald-man’s pate. For good work he needed a location fairly free of man-made electrical disturbances. So his turntable, delivered just before the war, lay in the cellar while he tried to get financial backing for a full-time study in some isolated spot.

Raising Money a Problem First he approached the universities. He went to his friend, Otto Struve, of Yerkes Observatory, of the University of Chicago. Struve was all for taking over the project, but in the end he couldn’t find the money. Harlow Shapley, of Harvard, said Rebel’s work was wonderful, but Harvard’s money, too, was all tied up. The young engineer got similar answers from distinguished scientists at other universities. But they all added: “Be sure to give me as reference.”

Fortified with references, Reber next tackled such people as officials of Belmont Radio, Bell Telephone, Sperry Gyroscope, Bendix, Stewart Warner, and other companies making or using electronic equipment. They all seemed sincerely interested, and they all said, in effect, “Now if you will just sit down and help us get our money back on this thing—.” Reber said it might be years before he could do that.

The break came a year ago last fall. Reber was in the audience when Dr. E. U. Condon, director of the Bureau of Standards, told a Chicago convention of elec- tronics men about the Bureau’s policy—to undertake research that commercial companies couldn’t do well or couldn’t do at all. Reber went home and wrote Condon that that was the sort of research he had been doing, too. Back came a letter asking if Reber would invite two Bureau physicists to look over his apparatus. Reber said sure.

The visit was set for November 20 but the government men arrived a day late-three of them instead of two. It was a miserable day—cold, rainy, not a sign of the sun. Nevertheless, Reber pointed the telescope at where the sun was supposed to be, and the four men huddled around the automatic recorder in Reber’s cellar. Even Reber was amazed at what happened then. The pen recorded solar radiation far stronger than any he had previously picked up. He listened in and heard rapidly changing puffs and swishes and grinding noises, all riding on top of a steady hiss. The sun, though entirely hidden from sight, was certainly putting on a show.

The visitors were impressed. But was Reber sure it was the sun? He turned the telescope to other parts of the sky, and the puffing and swishing faded out. Turn it back, they said. In came the solar static as strong as before.

A few days later, Washington sent Reber a job application blank.

Hobby Goes on the Pay Roll Reber signed on with the government last June to work full time at his hobby. Since then he has dismantled his equipment, shipped it east, and installed it at the Bureau’s radio propagation laboratory at Sterling, Va.—a great, flat, lonely field stretching away from a narrow red clay road and dotted with a few shacks and many antennas. It is a pretty good substitute, he thinks, for the desert he longed for when Wheaton spark plugs popped all night.

He has also adopted two German Wurzburgers to his work. A Wurzburger is an early warning device, a type of radar, made of steel mesh 25 feet in diameter. It resembles a hollowed-out quarter of an orange. Fitted with electronic equipment devised by Reber and trained on the sun by automatic control, the Wurzburgers take care of the solar radiation part of the program while the “telescope of tomorrow,” more suitable for Milky Way investigations, probes the rest of the universe.

Working full time and with the help of other Bureau scientists, Reber hopes within a few years to collect data that will tell broadcasters what frequencies they can expect to have jammed by cosmic and solar static, and how close together FM and television stations ought to be located if the public is to get the fullest benefit from them. He hopes to learn, also, where these heavenly broadcasts originate, and why.

To Seek Celestial Elements Right now he has these facts to go on: The cosmic radiations come from the direction of certain points in the Milky Way; with a few exceptions, he receives none from bright stars in other parts of the sky. So he concludes that the broadcasts arise in or behind the dark, gaseous clouds that form half of our supergalaxy. If so, why? We might know if we could learn what these clouds are composed of. Under certain conditions, each element sends out radiation of a certain frequency. The problem is to find the frequency and to build a set that will receive it. Reber is now finishing a set, to be used with his mirror, for tuning between 1,400 and 1,450 megacycles. “A smart Dutchman at Yerkes,” the astronomer H. C. Van de Hulst, has told him that there he may find hydrogen. If he does, he will then look for other elements.

This will still leave the final cause of the celestial broadcasts up in the air—or, rather, up in the empyrean where they come from. Perhaps they are one of the results of atomic fission in various cosmic laboratories. If that is so, the radiation has lost most of its energy before hitting the mirror of tomorrow’s telescope: it wouldn’t hurt even a Hiroshima flea.

Whatever the cause, the waves do have something to tell us—as immediately practical as where to spend millions of dollars on high-frequency broadcast stations, and as fundamental as the nature of the universe in which we whirl out our days.

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New Planets to Be Discovered

Detectives of the skies, as we may call astronomers, cover huge distances in pursuit of the disturbers of the solar system. On paper, they track planets yet unseen through billions of miles of empty space, until the fugitive can finally be “put on the spot” with the cross-hairs of a huge telescope, or on the sensitive surface of a photographic plate.

The ancients, when their attention was first directed to the skies as a subject of study, saw that, among the thousands of “fixed” stars, seven luminous bodies were continually moving: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. When they had learned to recognize the same “planet” as both morning and evening star they agreed that there were just seven planets. The Copernican theory reduced the Earth itself to a planet, and the Moon to its only satellite; but raised the Sun to a higher rank, so that six planets were then known. Later, the accidental discovery of Uranus restored the magic number.

However, in the year 1846, the theories of two astronomers, Leverrier and Adams, were startlingly justified by the discovery of an eighth planet at a greater distance than even Uranus. This planet, found in the place where it had been predicted, and named Neptune, was an impressive proof of the accuracy of modern astronomical observations.

“The Hidden Influence”

Briefly, the method of determining its existence, before it had been seen, was based on the fact that every planet is attracted, not only by the sun, but by every other planet. The total mass of the planets, compared to that of the sun, is small; but over a period of many years, it makes its effects visible. Observations of the outer planet Uranus, over more than half a century, indicated that beyond it was something which “perturbed” its motion; and Neptune was accordingly sought and found.

In more recent years, careful observations of Uranus and Neptune indicated other disturbing forces, not yet accounted for, but presumably indicating the presence of one or more large planets at immense distances. The late Percival Lowell, and Prof. W. H. Pickering, especially, gave much time to the study of this problem. The discovery, after long search, of the distant planet Pluto was hailed as bearing out Lowell’s predictions.

However, Pluto is disappointingly small; astronomers felt that the “biggest one had got away,” and Pickering, after further study, confidently announced the position (in a general way) of another planet “P” larger than any other except the giants Jupiter and Saturn. Conjecturally, its diameter is some 40,000 miles; but this cannot be verified until its disc is seen.

At present “P” is supposed to be in the southern constellation of the Telescope, which cannot be seen in the United States; and so slow is its motion that a couple of hundred years may pass before the northern observatories can look for it.

In the illustration heading this article, the solar system has been indicated as seen from the southern side of the ecliptic, or earth’s orbit. (While northern readers may think of the north as always uppermost, the idea is rather too local; and certainly has no justification for a viewpoint in outer space.) It has been impossible to preserve the scale, with reference to the inner planets; whose orbits would actually be inside the disc denoting the sun (in the center between pages). The footrule of the solar system—the earth’s mean distance from the sun, of nearly 93 million miles—is but one one-hundredth of the possible length of the orbit of “P.”

“Kepler’s Third Law”

It is a fundamental principle of astronomy that the “square of the time” of a body revolving around another is directly proportioned to the “cube of the distance,” and the sum of the masses of the two bodies.

For instance, Jupiter, at a little more than five times the distance of the earth, revolves around the sun in a little less than twelve years. The square of the time (11.86) equals the cube of the distance (5.2), when both are measured in units of the earth’s distance and the earth’s year.

But Saturn, at 886 million miles, or more than nine times the distance of the earth, makes only one revolution in some thirty years; Uranus, at (1782 million miles, has a “year” equal to 84 of ours; and Neptune, at the stupendous distance of 2,792 million miles, has completed little more than half his circuit of 165 years since he was first seen by human eyes.

All these planets revolve in very nearly the same plane as the earth, and are therefore found by the astronomer always in a narrow belt of the heavens which is called the Zodiac. But, when Pluto was discovered, it became apparent that his orbit is very eccentric, and inclined at a considerable angle to the rest of the solar system. Pluto passes at times within the orbit of Neptune, and at others is nearly four billion miles from the sun; his period is estimated at about 250 years, but it may be supposed that this estimate is subject to correction. As yet, it has been impossible to measure the diameter of Pluto with the micrometers used in telescopes; and it is presumed that he is not more than 4,000 miles across, or about the size of Mars, and a dwarf among the great outer planets.

The distance of the hypothetical planet “P” is supposed, on the basis of present estimates, to be from five to nine billion miles; and its period of revolution about 656 earthly years, corresponding to an average distance of seven billion miles.

Yet even “P” may not be the final outpost of the sun’s domain. Pickering also maintains the existence of two other planets “S” and “T,” on which more data are to be sought.

In the Outer Darkness Nearly two hundred years ago, the French astronomer Clairaut suggested the existence of outer planets, from another line of reasoning. The fact that comets, when their period of return to the neighborhood of the sun is tabulated, fall into groups, indicates that they are profoundly affected by the attraction of the large planets, which tend to make the former take orbits extending to about the distance of the latter. Emphasis was given this argument by the discovery later, of Uranus.

Pickering has tabulated the movements of sixteen comets, which he believes to be under the influence of “P”; others, no doubt, follow the movements of planets more distant. When it is considered that some comets recede from the sun to such a distance that a thousand years is required to go, and another thousand to return, the mind is somewhat awed by the possibility of a planet twenty-five billion miles from the sun, and revolving around it in a period of more than four thousand years.

At such a distance, the sun would apparently have shrunk to a point of light, betraying no disc to the eye, and giving hut one sixty-seven-thousandth of the light which we receive from our luminary. Such a planet, though as large as Jupiter, might be forever invisible to us at its enormous distance, yet exert enormous gravitational influence on the denizens of interstellar space, and draw in to us those comets which come and go at intervals of two thousand years. On such a planet, too, if its movements could be observed, over enough millennia, the influence of the nearby stars like Alpha Centauri and Sirius might be measured.

Planetary Distances and Sizes A few other points of explanation are required by our illustration: the radio announcer shown at the left is supposed to be on earth. His message, travelling at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), will reach Mars, when nearest us, in a little over four minutes; Jupiter, when also in opposition, in 35 minutes; Saturn in more than an hour; Uranus, two and a half hours; Neptune in four hours, Pluto in six, and “P” in ten hours, more or less. The radio wave crosses the orbit of the earth, from side to side, in less than seventeen minutes; to reach the nearest of the stars, supposing its power sufficient, would take more than four years!

The mass of the sun is more than five hundred times that of its known planets and their satellites; half of the mass of these is concentrated in the huge Jupiter. Saturn is lighter than his bulk of water, and his great rings are a cloud of small flying particles—a whorl of dust. The earth is the densest of all bodies in the system, so far as we know, except for the lumps of solid iron which occasionally, as meteorites, collide with it.

In preparing the illustration at the right, it was impossible to show the sun in the foreground on the same scale as his satellites. If we represent Jupiter as a ball, six feet in diameter, the sun must be a globe of more than sixty feet; the earth one of a little less than seven inches; and the largest of the asteroids, less than half an inch across. Our own moon is shown as a mere spot; the larger moons of the outer planets exceed it in size, however.

One thing more—the distances separating these heavenly bodies. No map, and no orrery or mechanical model can show them in their proper relative sizes and distances. Scaling down the sun into a sixty-foot globe, as we have done, the earth is represented by a 6^4-inch globe at a distance of one mile and 150 feet; Jupiter is a six-foot globe six miles away; Neptune a 28-inch globe at more than thirty miles; “P,” if as predicted, must be represented by a ball nearly three feet across, located somewhere between fifty and ninety miles from the center. That is, if our model of the sun were erected in Central Park, New York, planet “P” might be between Trenton, N. J., and Philadelphia; and, for all we know, there may be planets which should be placed at Boston, Buffalo or Richmond. As for our nearest neighbors among the stars, they are drawn in, on this modest scale, to about the distance of the moon!