Sep 5 1978
From The Space Library
NASA announced plans to launch Tiros-N from WTR Sept. 15 as part of a third generation of new meteorological satellites. First of a series of eight polar-orbiting environmental spacecraft, Tiros-N would carry new environmental monitors representing significant technological advances over those on the current NOAA-series spacecraft. NOAA's National Environmental Satellite Services (NESS) would operate Tiros-N, intended to improve weather analysis for more accurate weather forecasts; to locate ocean currents and areas of upwelling, important to fishing and shipping interests; and to acquire more precise data on snow cover, snowmelt, and rainfall, essential to water resource management and flood forecasting. Also possible would be more accurate alerts of high-energy solar-radiation levels above the atmosphere, important to space missions, high-altitude commercial air- craft flights, long-range communications, and electrical power distribution networks.
Its advanced data-collection and platform-location system meant that Tiros-N would have for the first time an operational capability to collect and transmit environmental data from platforms on land, at sea, and in the air; and to determine the geographic locations of those platforms in motion on the surface of the sea, land, or aloft. Tiros-N's scanning radiometer, most versatile to be carried aboard an environmental satellite, could gather and store for later playback visible and infrared measurements and images in 4 channels for more precise evaluation of land, ice, surface-water, and cloud conditions, and sea-surface temperatures, transmitting them in real time to both automatic picture transmission (APT) and high-resolution picture-transmission (HRPT) users in more than 100 countries around the world. The vertical-sounder subsystem, containing three instruments, could register temperatures to within 1°C and moisture data from earth's surface up through the stratosphere. Even under obscuring cloud cover, Tiros-N could obtain some data because one of the three instruments would be able to record microwave radiation regardless of clouds.
Tiros-N would be a primary data source for the Global Atmospheric Research Program's first global experiment, an international cooperative project of 140 countries scheduled to begin Dec. 1, 1978. Its instruments would meet FGE requirements for collecting quantitative data on earth's atmosphere and sea surface to construct numerical atmospheric models for improved long-range weather forecasts. Sensors were multinational: the stratospheric-sounding units were from Great Britain, the data collection platform-location system from France, and other sensors from the U.S. Ground-support systems were also multinational: the U.S. would acquire and process most data through NAAA's command and data-acquisition (CDA) stations near Fairbanks, Alaska; Wallops Island, Va.; and a central processing system at Suitland, Md. France's Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) would process and distribute data associated with collection and the platform-location system.
Tiros-N instruments had drawn heavily on technology from NASA's Nimbus-spacecraft program: Tiros-N's bus was a modified USAF Block 5D. spacecraft bus with a 25% growth allowance in payload-carrying capability. NASA had designed and funded Tiros-N; Goddard Space Flight Center would manage it during checkout (about 2mo) before turning it over to NOAA. Launch vehicle would be a standard reconditioned Atlas E/F. (NASA Release 78-132; NASA press conf. Sept 8/78; Spaceport News, Sept 15/78, 2)
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