Jul 31 1978
From The Space Library
NASA announced that its scientists had been studying radar images of the North American coast from SEASAT 1, first ocean-monitoring satellite, launched in June 1978 and now in a 805km (500mi) high polar orbit. One of the satellite's five microwave sensors, a powerful radar system called a synthetic aperture radar (SAR), could take pictures of earth's surface day or night under any weather conditions. A typical SAR operation had produced a continuous swath of radar images 97km (60mi) wide by 4023km (2500mi) long, extending from the Mexican west coast to Alaska. JPL, manager of the SEASAT project, had processed the images. Scientists from NASA, NOAA, the Natl. Environmental Satellite Service, the U.S. Navy, and USES had received images of the Arctic pack, the Gulf Stream off the east coast of Fla., the Caribbean off the northern coast of South America, and a hurricane zone near the Baja Calif. peninsula. (NASA Release 78-116)
ESA announced that its Geos 2 scientific satellite, launched from Cape Canaveral July 14 on a Delta and placed in geosynchronous orbit, had reached its scheduled position of 6°E on July 26. It would move during its 2-yr mission from its first operational station in geosynchronous orbit 35 900km above the equator through a zone extending from 0° to 37°E longitude. On July 26 the European Space Operations Centre at Darmstadt, West Germany, had switched on the S-band telemetry system and the magnetometer experiment, and would switch on six other experiments progressively until the satellite had become fully operational in early Aug. All data confirmed that Geos 2 was functioning correctly. The satellite, positioned on magnetic field lines linked to the earth's auroral zones, could correlate those data with similar data acquired from associated auroral stations by ground-based balloon-borne or rocketborne instruments. NASA had expected that the Geos 2 data, correlated with data acquired by the already launched Isee A and B and by the ISEE-C scheduled for launch in Aug. 1978, would constitute a substantial body of information on the magnetosphere to aid in understanding the effect of interplanetary-space processes on the near-earth environment. (ESA Release July 31/78)
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