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
Two milestone events (5 to 65+ years ago)
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 – MILESTONE: 65 years ago
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 – MILESTONE: 55 years ago
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.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL.
