The events on this day in history for our heritage companies are noted below.
The earliest event was in 1959, the latest event was in 2005
Human Spaceflight:
1990 – LANDING: STS-41 (Discovery), Edwards AFB
Military and Classified Programs:
1972 – LAUNCH: Classified mission, MM Titan IIID, SLC4E, VAFB
Exploration and Interplanetary Programs:
NONE
Earth-Monitoring and Civil Weather Satellite programs:
1978 – Lockheed Seasat satellite fails four months after launch – radar aperture ocean studies – power failure in the Agena D
Commercial Programs:
NONE
Test, ICBM, FBM programs:
1959 – LAUNCH: GD Atlas D, LC13, CCAFS
1960 – LAUNCH: Lockheed Polaris A1, LC25A, CCAFS
1961 – GD Atlas E 548th squadron turned over to SAC, Forbes AFB, Kansas
1966 – LAUNCH: Lockheed Polaris A3, SSBN601, ETR
1969 – LAUNCH FAILURE: GD Atlas F/Trident, 576-A3, VAFB
1975 – LAUNCH: Lockheed Poseidon C3, SSBN619, ETR
1997 – LAUNCH (2): LM Trident D5, UK S30, ETR
2005 – LAUNCH: LM Trident D5, UK S28, ETR
Other:
NONE
The photo today is an artist’s conception of the Seasat satellite, which had a synthetic aperture radar system to study ocean waves and movement. The massive power failure was in the Agena D bus. Seasat did lead the way for development of future ocean monitoring spacecraft like QuickScat. The complete complement of instruments were as follows (from Wikipedia):
- Radar altimeter to measure spacecraft height above the ocean surface
- Microwave Scatterometer to measure wind speed and direction
- Scanning multichannel microwave radiometer to measure sea surface temperature
- Visible and infrared radiometer to identify cloud, land and water features
- Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) L-band, HH polarization, fixed look angle to monitor the global surface wave field and polar sea ice conditions {the antenna is the light parallelogram in the picture}. The SAR support structure was designed and manufactured by Northrop Grumman Astro Aerospace. The structure deployed on orbit.
