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The bullet-shaped satellite payload, about 6.5 inches in diameter and 3 feet long, carried three micrometeorite detectors (a microphone, a wire grid, and metallic film), temperature sensors, and a special cosmic-ray chamber developed by Van Allen's graduate students at Iowa State University to determine the intensity of high-energy charged particles surrounding the Earth. Just after the launch of Sputnik-1 on October 4, 1957, and the Navy’s first Vanguard failure in December, the JPL-ABMA group was permitted to adapt their Jupiter-C reentry test vehicle into an instrumented satellite. Pickering, who would provide the satellite itself and Wernher von Braun of the ABMA, who would provide the launch system. Three principal players stayed in close touch and remained ready to act: geophysicist James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, who would provide the primary scientific instrument for the payload JPL director William H. Army Ordnance had lost out to the Navy in 1955 to launch the United States' first satellite, but as ABMA continued to develop reentry vehicles for ballistic missiles, it also kept its hopes of getting into orbit alive.
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It had been something of a mad dash getting Explorer 1 ready. The referenced media source is missing and needs to be re-embedded. Everyone keenly knew that up in Washington DC, very important people at the Pentagon and at the National Academy were waiting for word, as were plenty of reporters. The United States Navy had failed to launch the Vanguard satellite just two months prior in early December, and the Soviet Union by now had launched two Sputniks (the second one with a dog, Laika). The stakes were impossibly high and so were tensions. Medaris snapped: “Don’t give me any of this probability crap, Hibbs. This was the dawn of the Space Age.Ībout a half hour after launch, Albert Hibbs, Explorer's systems designer from JPL responsible for orbit calculations, walked to the next room to report that they were 95 percent certain that Explorer was in orbit. Unfortunately, there were no tracking stations down-range able to communicate its progress for some time and all the team could do was estimate probabilities. The launch looked good, and messages from Explorer continued until the satellite dipped below the horizon. A few miles from the launch pad, crowded into one corner of a Quonset hut, engineers, technicians, and scientists intensely examined radio and radar telemetry data and plotted the trajectory of the missile. On January 31, 1958, the successful launch of Explorer 1 was critical.Įxplorer 1 was launched by a Jupiter-C missile on January 31, 1958, from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's (ABMA) Cape Canaveral Missile Annex in Florida.