TIROS-the system and its evolution

At 6:40 A.M. on April 1, 1960, the TIROS I satellite was launched, went into its planned orbit, and demonstrated full capability of operation. The cloud pictures returned to earth not only fulfilled all the expectations of the satellite designers from a technical standpoint, but also proved to be informative and of practical value to meteorologists. The effects of the space environment on the satellite itself remained well within the design extremes. Ground operations also went according to plan, with the highly-automated equipment successfully programming the satellite, and then reconstructing the received pictures and their identification coding for photographic reproduction. One of the photographs taken by the wide-angle camera is shown in Fig. 1. The following paper, prepared before the date of launch, describes the satellite and ground data-acquisition system. A brief history tracing the evolution of the project from its earliest concepts is included, as well as a discussion of the major factors, both technical and managerial which affected the final design.