Today in History – January 14, 2005 – Huygens Probe Lands on Titan.

After spending seven years in space, the Huygens probe separated from the main Cassini spacecraft on December 24, 2004, and spent the next three weeks traveling to the moon Titan. After beginning its descent, it transmitted scientific data for nearly five hours before running out of power. The Huygens probe was named after the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. He is credited with the discovery of Titan and thus it was deemed fitting to name the probe after him.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s related resources Saturn and Cassini. Or visit the Aerospace Engineering Education community site.

Today in History – January 11, 1954 – Although radio weather broadcasts have been around since 1922, it was not until 1953 that BBC executives, gathered for a luncheon, introduced the idea of presenting a weather forecast on television. These BBC executives searched the Met Office and chose the 32-year-old George Cowling, a former Royal Air Force meteorologist, to take on this new idea. Cowling delivered the first televised weather forecast on January 11th, 1954 at 7:55 PM from BBC’s Lime Grove Studios. The broadcast lasted for only five minutes and cost 50 pounds to deliver, but it started a weather forecasting revolution. Today, the BBC’s Weather Center produces 100 forecasts each weekday, now with the help of modern computer, lighting, sound, and camera technology. This equipment was not available to Cowling, who relied on an easel to deliver his first broadcast.

Two months later RCA produced the first color television sets. See Lisa Huettel’s March 25 blog on this event.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the color television. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History – December 19, 1972 – Apollo 17, last of Apollo Moon landing series, returns to Earth. It was the sixth and last Apollo mission in which humans walked on the lunar surface.

Also on this date in 1958, the first radio message was broadcast from space from the U.S. launched Explorer-1. Later that year, the U.S. SCORE spacecraft became the first communication satellite in Earth orbit. It was a one-way communication system with a transmitter that broadcast to Earth a pre-recorded message, taped on the ground before launch by President Dwight D. Eisenhower – “To all mankind, America’s wish for Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men Everywhere”.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway;s resources on the Apollo mission and space exploration, communications satellites or GPS and geomatics systems. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education, Electrical Engineering Education , or Surveying and Geomatics Engineering Education disciplinary communities.

Today in History – December 18, 1958 – SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbital Relay Equipment) was the world’s first communications satellite to be put into orbit. As the first American satellite to relay communications from one ground station to another, SCORE used a tape recorder to store and forward voice messages. It was used to send a Christmas greeting via short wave frequency to the world from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The SCORE satellite was designed and built by Kenneth Masterman-Smith, a military communication research engineer, along with other personnel with the U.S. Army Signal Research and Development Laboratory (SRDL) at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Launched in an Atlas rocket, SCORE provided a first test of a communications relay system in space. The technical objectives were to demonstrate the capabilities of satellite launch from an Atlas missile and the feasibility of transmitting messages through the upper atmosphere from one ground station to one or more ground stations. Score placed the United States at an even technological par with the Soviet Union as a highly functional response to the Sputnik satellites. The payload weighed 150 pounds, and was built into the fairing pods of the 9000 pound Atlas missile. Any of four ground stations in the southern United States could command the satellite into playback mode to transmit the stored message or into record mode to receive and store a new message. Its batteries lasted 12 days and it reentered the atmosphere on 21 January 1959.

SCORE was an early research endeavor for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which eventually evolved into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It was developed during the dawn of satellite communication innovation in the U.S. and abroad. The first satellite equipped with on-board radio-transmitters was the Soviet Sputnik 1, launched in 1957. NASA launched an Echo satellite in 1960; the 100-foot aluminized PET film balloon served as a passive reflector for radio communications. Courier 1B, (built by Philco) also launched in 1960, was the world’s first active repeater satellite. Telstar was the first active, direct relay communications satellite. Belonging to AT&T as part of a multi-national agreement between AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French National PTT (Post Office) to develop satellite communication, it was launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, the first privately sponsored space launch.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on communications satellites or GPS and geomatics systems. For related curricula, visit the Information Technology Education, Electrical Engineering Education , Surveying and Geomatics Engineering Education disciplinary communities.

Today in History – December 8, 1993 – First functional GPS (Global Positioning System) was developed. The technology initially developed for military use eventually made its way into our daily lives- most notably in cars and cell phones. Using information from a number of satellites orbiting the Earth (originally with 24, now a total of 30), a GPS receiver can pinpoint your location in real time with the help of atomic clocks, which makes this accurate to one billionth of a second. The GPS manufacturing and development industry has launched into a multi-billion dollar industry with its vast number of practical applications- from locating lost ships at sea to studying earthquakes by monitoring plate tectonics like the people at SCIGN (Southern California Integrated GPS Network). Soon enough, they will be available in credit card sizes, making it even more convenient to carry one around.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on GPS and geomatics. For related curricula, visit the Information Technology Education, Computer Engineering Education, Electrical Engineering Education , Surveying and Geomatics Engineering Education disciplinary communities.

Also on this date in 2004- After popularizing the PC in the ’80s, IBM sells its PC business to a Chinese company. The computer industry giant decided to let go of its retail computer division in order to concentrate on software development and providing services at a larger scale.

Today in History – November 28, 1964 – Mariner 4, was launched and became the first successful mission to Mars. Reaching Mars on a flyby on July 14 and 15, 1965, it was the first spacecraft to return close-up images of the surface (center image above) and lasted three years in solar orbit. In Mariner 4′s 21 pictures, the images showed a planet that was barren and riddled with craters, contrary to the fanciful science fiction images of the Red Planet that portrayed it as inhabitable and full of life. Mariner 4 also carried instruments to study cosmic dust, solar plasma, radiation belts, and magnetic fields. Lessons learned from the Mariner 3 (which failed) and the Mariner 4 were vital for future unmanned space missions under NASA’s Mariner mission program to explore the inner solar system. The Mariner 10 (being assembled in right-most image above) was launched on November 1973 and during its two year mission transmitted over 12,ooo images of Mecury and Venus until March 1975.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on Mars and space exploration. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education Community site.

Its interesting to view recent space exploration with that of Portuguese mariner and explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who reached the Pacific Ocean on this date centuries earlier in 1520. Magellan, with the crew of three ships, were the first documented Europeans to travel across the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. It does make wonder whether exploration is a fundamental part of human destiny.

Today in History – November 19, 1969 – The Apollo 12 becomes the second successful manned lunar landing with astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean. The Apollo 12 mission almost failed at launch due to a leaking hydrogen tank; fortunately launch crew managed to change it before takeoff. The failure of the television camera was caused by Alan Bean, who had accidentally pointed it directly at the Sun causing the optics to burn out. The two astronauts spent over seven hours on the lunar surface and successfully retrieved parts of the Surveyor lander and returned it to Earth.

Apollo 13, the next manned mission to the moon, was launched on April 11, 1970 and nearly ended in tragedy when there was a fire and an explosion on board. Fortunately, quick thinking and skill by the astonauts and ground command allowed the astronauts to return to earth safely, but without carrying out their lunar landing mission. A total of eight astronauts travelled to the moon in five more Apollo missions with the final manned lunar landing of the Apollo 17 mission accomplished in December 1972. NASA maintains extensive online resources associated with the Apollo missions, including logs of the flight and lunar surface journals of the astronauts.

The high cost of the Apollo manned space exploration program led NASA to focus more on unmanned flights in future years. Much to the surprise of the public, President Bush in January 2004 announced a new program to send American astronauts to the Moon by 2020 as the launching point for missions to Mars and further into space. It is not clear whether NASA will be able to stay the course on this program with the changeover in NASA adminstration and presidential elections.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the Apollo mission and space exploration. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education Community site.

Today in History – April 13, 1960 – First U.S. navigational satellite. Transit satellites were used by the US Navy to develop the first operational navigation satellite system The Transit satellites provided an accurate, all-weather navigational aid for ballistic missile submarines and surface vessels and aircraft. The system was designed such that any craft could pinpoint its position by using a computer specially programmed to translate coded radio signals beamed from the satellites into latitude and longitude.

Transit 1-B, the first in the series, was placed in a north-south polar orbit on April 13, 1960. It had a 40-month life-span, but it operated for only 89 days. Transit 1-B transmitted on two frequency pairs to test the technique for refraction correction and to determine if the transmitted frequencies should be close together or far apart. It also tested a magnetic torque device for spacecraft attitude control – the first satellite to do so. Three advanced Transit models equipped with nuclear-power generators were launched from June 22, 1960, to Nov. 15, 1961.

Transit provided continuous navigation satellite service from 1964, initially for Polaris submarines and later for civilian use. Transit receivers used the known characteristics of the satellites orbit, measured the Doppler shift of the satellite’s radio signal, and thereby calculated the receivers position on the earth. Individual satellites operated for over 10 years. Technical breakthroughs during the program included gravity gradient stabilization, the use of radio-isotope thermoelectric generators (RTG), and navigation satellite technologies used in the later GPS series. The TRIAD satellite was launched in 1972 to test improvements. Transit was superseded by the Navstar global positioning system. The use of the satellites for navigation was discontinued at the end of 1996, but the satellites continued transmitting and became the Navy Ionospheric Monitoring System (NIMS).

Also on this date in 1974, the Westar-1 satellite was launched by Western Union and NASA. This was the first commercially-launched American geosynchronous communications satellite.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on satellites and navigation. For curricular resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education, Electrical Engineering Education and the Surveying and Geomatics Engineering Education community sites.

Today in History – January 31, 1958 – Explorer 1 became the United States of America’s first satellite to orbit the Earth after it was launched on January 31, 1958. After the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik I on October 4, 1957, the United States of America embarked upon a program to launch it own artificial satellite. The first American attempt to launch a satellite using a Vanguard 1 rocket occurred in December 1957 and failed miserably.

Following this failure, the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency, located at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, AL, was directed to launch a scientific satellite using a Jupiter C rocket developed under Dr. Wernher von Braun. The artificial satellite was designed, built and operated by the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory under the direction of Dr. William Pickering.

The satellite instrumentation of Explorer 1 was a cosmic ray counter designed by Dr. James Van Allen, a physicist at the University of Iowa. The cosmic ray counter experiment was designed to measure the radiation that surrounds the Earth. Once in orbit, the cosmic ray counter began to overload and measured a much lower cosmic ray count than previously assumed. Given this new information, Dr. Van Allen theorized that the cosmic ray equipment may have been exposed to very strong radiation caused by a belt of charged particles trapped in space by Earth’s magnetic field.

The data returned by Explorer 1 and another satellite launched in March 1958 prove the existence of intense belts of radiation that surround the Earth. These belts of radiation are now called Van Allen Belts and are considered to be the first major scientific discovery of the space age.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Explorer I and satellites. For more educational resources, see our aeronautical engineering education and electrical engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History – January 11, 1954 – Although radio weather broadcasts have been around since 1922, it was not until 1953 that BBC executives, gathered for a luncheon, introduced the idea of presenting a weather forecast on television. These BBC executives searched the Met Office and chose the 32-year-old George Cowling, a former Royal Air Force meteorologist, to take on this new idea. Cowling delivered the first televised weather forecast on January 11th, 1954 at 7:55 PM from BBC’s Lime Grove Studios. The broadcast lasted for only five minutes and cost 50 pounds to deliver, but it started a weather forecasting revolution. Today, the BBC’s Weather Center produces 100 forecasts each weekday, now with the help of modern computer, lighting, sound, and camera technology. This equipment was not available to Cowling, who relied on an easel to deliver his first broadcast.

Two months later RCA produced the first color television sets. See Lisa Huettel’s March 25 blog on this event.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the color television. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.