WWV (radio station)

Colorado

In 1958 a professor used this station's radio signal to watch Sputnik break apart in the sky.

engineeringaviationhistorical

A radio signal from a transmitter site outside Fort Collins once tracked the death of the first satellite. In 1958, Sputnik One's onboard electronics had failed, so nobody could follow it down. John D. Kraus, a professor at Ohio State University, had an idea. He knew a meteor entering the upper atmosphere leaves behind a trail of ionized air, and that trail bounces stray radio signals back toward the ground, briefly making them stronger. He guessed a disintegrating satellite would do the same thing, only bigger. He watched the station's twenty megahertz signal. It strengthened, and stayed strong for more than a minute. The direction and the timing matched the predicted path of Sputnik's last orbits. From that, Kraus built a full timeline of the breakup. What he learned was that a satellite does not come down as one object. It comes apart into its pieces as it falls.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
WWV's 20 MHz signal was used for a unique purpose in 1958: to track the disintegration of Russian satellite Sputnik 1 after the craft's onboard electronics failed.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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