TRACKING SPUTNIKShirleys Bay: Delivery Room Participant to the Space Age
Everyone who participated in the early days of the space race will tell you about the excitement they felt.
Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) staff at Shirleys Bay were in the enviable position of being prepared to contribute in a meaningful way, even as Sputnik 1 was launched. This historical excerpt gives us a feeling for what it might have been like to be part of Shirleys Bay during those exciting times.
"We had for several months been expecting the launching of the American satellite, but its orbit was to be at low latitudes so that we would not be able to make any use of it. Suddenly, in October 1957, Sputnik was launched. Not only was it passing regularly over Canada, but it carried a radio beacon that was intended to assist in the tracking process. Since the launch was unexpected, there were few, if any laboratories outside the USSR set up for the determination of the satellite orbit at many places in the world. This was important, and the earlier the better because this determination would give new information about the earth's gravitational field and about its atmosphere.
Because the launch was unexpected, all the radio observatories and laboratories in the Western World were starting even in a light-hearted "race" to see who could first determine and describe the satellite orbit.
I remember hearing the first announcement of the satellite and its radio beacons on the CBC News. Within minutes, Clare Collins had agreed to meet me at the lab and, within hours, we had picked up the Sputnik signal and were devising methods to determine the precise location of the satellite each time it approached Ottawa. As they showed up to work on Monday morning, others, including Colin Hines, were recruited. As word spread of our initial progress, offers of
assistance came in from the National Research Council's Radio and Electrical Engineering Division and from the Department of Transport's monitoring station. All such offers were gratefully accepted, because we were learning as we went. Most of us hadn't thought about orbital motion since undergraduate days, but we relearned what was needed in a few days, or at least what we thought was needed. Later, Nature (and the Russians) trapped us neatly. Sputnik 2 was launched into an orbit for which many of the approximations that we had made for Sputnik I proved to be invalid. Fortunately, since we were still doing all our calculations by hand, we realized something was wrong. Some of the other groups who were using computers kept churning out quite ridiculous orbital parameters for some time. But for Sputnik I, all went smoothly. After three nearly sleepless days and nights of observations and calculations, we had narrowed the possible orbits down to two and here the NRC people were able to give us a single observation that eliminated the ambiguity. We had the orbit and happily sent it off by telegram to the World Data Center in Washington. Later it was confirmed that this was the first valid orbital determination made and reported, at least in the Western Hemisphere and probably one of the first, if not the first, in the Western World."
- Peter Forsyth DRTE Defence Program Manager
reprinted with permission from www.friendsofcrc.ca/
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