The events on this day in history for our heritage companies are noted below.
The earliest event was in 1963, the latest event was in 2023
No milestone events (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
2023 – LM Lucy mission flew by asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh, revealing it to be a binary pair
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. FB will not allow me to post both a link and photos.
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.
