No.8 Re-wired: Pickering’s Satellite

In the mid to late 1950s, the space race was well and truly on. The US and the USSR were staring at each other across the Bering Strait and daring each other to outdo as they each got closer to the ultimate goal of putting a man in space.

Imagine the Americans’ surprise and envy when, on 4 October 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first man-made object into orbit. It orbited the Earth every 98 minutes, passing over the continental United States seven times a day. Amateur radio fans could tune in to its signals and hear the strange beeping emanating from the unseen object many miles above their heads. It was up there, taunting them.

There was no way the US of A could let that one go, so in November 1957 they gave the job of creating their own satellite to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology. The JPL was headed by a Kiwi, Dr William Pickering (b. 1910, d. 2004).

Pickering was born in Wellington, but he moved to America to study for his PhD in physics. After a stint as professor of electrical engineering he helped set up and then ran the JPL, which developed, among other things, rockets. In 1957, the task before the team at the JPL was immense. They were to create a satellite that was technologically the equal of Sputnik, and get it into space as soon as possible. They accomplished this in three short months.

The satellite they put together was dubbed Explorer 1, and it weighed a mere 10kg. It carried with it a cosmic-ray detection package, an internal temperature sensor, three external temperature sensors, a nose-cone temperature sensor, a micrometeorite impact microphone, and a ring of micrometeorite erosion gauges.

Which, I’m sure you’ll agree, sounds adequate for the purposes. Crudely speaking, the team at the JPL strapped all of this to the top of a rocket, pointed it into the sky and, on 31 January 1958, the US caught up. One of the experiments carried out by Explorer was searching for the existence of charged particles high in our atmosphere. The satellite found these particles in a layer, trapped by Earth’s magnetic field – dubbed the Van Allen radiation belts after James Van Allen, Pickering’s colleague who had designed the experiment.

The discovery of the Van Allen belts by the Explorer series of satellites was considered to be one of the outstanding discoveries of the International Geophysical Year, an interna- tional scientific project that lasted from 1 July 1957 to 31 December 1958.

Explorer 1 orbited Earth every 106 minutes, powered by batteries which helped it transmit data back to Earth. The batteries gave out after a mere 31 days, leaving Explorer floating in space as a hunk of useless but memorable space junk. Pickering went on to become an influential figure in the American space race as it progressed over the following years, and the very public success of Explorer gave him the credibility and freedom to be included in other projects. He worked on plans for near-Earth satellites, deep space missions and the development of manned space travel, among other things. Under his leadership until 1976, the JPL carried on creating satellites and rockets which helped the US to explore space – Pioneer 4, the Mariner flights to Venus and Mars and the unmanned lunar landings of 1966/67 were projects undertaken and led by Pickering.

Being a Kiwi – albeit one with American citizenship –   Pickering was awarded an honorary knighthood for his achievements. He also won many accolades and awards and appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice. He passed away in 2004 at the age of 93. In 2009, a peak in the Kepler Range in Fiordland was named Mount Pickering in his honour.