The events on this day in history for our heritage companies are noted below.
November 1
The earliest event was in 1963, the latest event was in 2023
One milestone event (5 to 65+ years ago)
Human Spaceflight:
1992 – LANDING: STS-52 (Columbia), KSC
1993 – LANDING: STS-58 (Columbia), Edwards AFB
Military and Classified Programs:
1962 – USAF awards a contract worth $173 million to UTC/CSD for continued development of 5-segment solid rocket boosters for the MM Titan III program
2022 – LAUNCH: LM/Terran Orbital LINUSS Chase/RSO nanosats (with multiple other payloads including LDPE-2, Shepherd Demonstration, Alpine, Tetra-1, USA-344), Falcon Heavy FH-004, LC-39A, KSC – Satellite servicing demo missions (LINUSS)
Exploration and Interplanetary Programs:
1994 – LAUNCH: MM (GE/RCA) Wind , Delta 7925-10, LC17B, CCAFS – Solar Wind experiments at L1 point – MILESTONE: 30 years ago
2023 – LM Lucy mission flew by asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh, revealing it to be a binary pair (one year ago)
Earth-Monitoring and Civil Weather Satellite programs:
NONE
Commercial Programs:
NONE
Test, ICBM, FBM programs:
1963 – LAUNCH: MM Titan II, LC15, CCAFS – Test of accumulators to lessen the impact of longitudinal vibrations (POGO); successful test led to adoption of the accumulator mod on Gemini vehicles
1967 – LAUNCH (4): Lockheed Polaris A3, SSBN657, ETR
2003 – LAUNCH: LM Trident D-5, SSBN733, ETR
Other:
NONE
The images today are from two events. First, there is a photo of Wind’s launch vehicle, a Delta 7925-10, just before launch in 1994 (thirty years ago). Second, there is an artist’s conception of Wind and its configuration in the L1 orbit. Photo Credits: NASA/Image credit: NASA/GSFC. Wind was built at the East Windsor facility.
The global geospace Wind satellite is still operational at L1 as of 11/1/2024, with enough fuel to last until 2070. Here are the objectives of Wind (from Wikipedia):
- Provide complete plasma, energetic particle, and magnetic field input for magnetospheric and ionospheric studies.
- Determine the magnetospheric output to interplanetary space in the up-stream region.
- Investigate basic plasma processes occurring in the near-Earth solar wind.
- Provide baseline ecliptic plane observations to be used in heliospheric latitudes by the Ulysses mission.
Since I don’t want this to be really long, I recommend going to the Wikipedia site and find their article on the Wind spacecraft. The article has a huge list of discoveries.
Second, there is a photo of the asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh taken by the Lucy spacecraft one year ago. The asteroid was found to be a binary. Here is the description of the photo (Photo Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab):
This image shows the “moonrise” of the satellite as it emerges from behind asteroid Dinkinesh as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby of the asteroid binary. This image was taken at 12:55 p.m. EDT (1655 UTC) Nov. 1, 2023, within a minute of closest approach, from a range of approximately 270 miles (430 km). From this perspective, the satellite is behind the primary asteroid. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.
