SATELLITE-TRACKING PROGRAM — ^HAYES 347 



Those weeks were not without dramatic moments quite unrelated 

 to the satellite-tracking program. Nearby St. Augustine Mountain, 

 some 8,000 feet high, became a challenge to those who were not fully 

 taxed by the demands of setting up the first station. On one climb, 

 Stinnett fractured an ankle and had to be carried down the mountain 

 by Whidden, Grady, and Henize. He was promptly appointed safety 

 officer for the group. One evening Bandemer, in the excitement of 

 pointing out to the Duchenkis a transit of Sputnik I, fell into the grease 

 pit of the gasoline station next door and had to be hospitalized for 

 cuts and bruises. 



The training program itself was, of course, wholly without prece- 

 dent. There had been some talk about preparing an observer's man- 

 ual, but this proved to be impossible since there was not even a proto- 

 type camera to work with at that time. The observers were eager to 

 learn the necessary techniques for the full operation of a tracking 

 station. This involved considerably more than the camera itself. 

 They had to learn how to maintain the Norrman clock, to develop 

 the film, to cany through a field-reduction program of measuring the 

 position of the satellite image on the film, and to maintain efficient 

 communications with headquarters in Cambridge. 



Tlie first films taken with the camera in New Mexico were out of 

 focus because the primary corrector cell had unfinished optics. This 

 cell remained in use until March 1958, when it was replaced. There- 

 after, the camera was able to acquire the faint image of Explorer I. 



Time reduction was very primitive. None of them knew much 

 about the corrections that had to be applied to "\"\nW time in order 

 to calibrate the Norrman clock. At the Harvard Meteor Project, 

 timing was needed to an accuracy of only one-half second, in no way 

 comparable to the millisecond that was the goal of the satellite- 

 tracking system. 



The film of the Baker-Nunn camera was somewhat difficult to work 

 with when compared with the concave molded frames used in the 

 Harvard ]\Ieteor Project. And there was no microscope available for 

 finding the star field in which the satellite image appeared. 



Moonwatch was of major assistance in pinpointing predictions for 

 the first camera. Observatory predictions sent from Cambridge were 

 off by 5 or 10 minutes in Alamogordo, Las Cruces, Albuquerque, and 

 Phoenix. A small group in El Paso — actually not a registered Moon- 

 watch team — called in observations at the last minute to Las Cruces. 

 The Observatory even arranged a conference with five local Moon- 

 watch teams so that they would, wlien they saw a satellite passage, 

 telephone the position and their location to the Organ Pass station. 

 Finding the satellite image itself was then no particular problem, 

 especially as 1957 a 1 was a very bright object. The observers could 

 run the film through a projector and look among the streaks with 



