TIROS-1, the world’s first weather satellite, operated for less than three months but inspired an Earth observation fleet that has expanded to more than 1,000 spacecraft in the seven decades that followed. TIROS-1 — for Television Infrared Observation Satellite — launched in April 1960 as the first in a five-year series of 10 TIROS satellites, each more advanced than the previous one.
Sensors aboard some of today’s Earth-imaging satellites capture the entire surface of the globe every 24 hours, home in on troops conducting maneuvers and even measure the water content in soils. TIROS-1, developed early in the Space Age, carried out a task primitive by comparison: train two compact, black-and-white TV cameras on cloud formations as the satellite circled Earth from pole to pole every 100 minutes or so at a low Earth orbit altitude of some 645 kilometers. But in the process, TIROS-1 — resembling a shiny, round hatbox about a meter in diameter — proved the new tools known as satellites could look homeward to provide information that would transform the way we live.
Partners in its development included Radio Corporation of America, the television pioneers commonly known as RCA; Army and Navy units involved in signals and imagery; NASA, just 2 years old in 1960; and the Weather Bureau, renamed the National Weather Service in 1970 and folded into the new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Stephen Volz, a NOAA administrator, said in 2020 that TIROS-1 stands as a milestone in weather observation, broadening the perspective of a meteorological community whose understanding and interpretations at the time had been entirely local.
Launch
TIROS-1 lifted off at 6:40 a.m. on April 1, 1960, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It rode into space atop a three-stage, 27-meter Thor-Able rocket first developed to carry ballistic missiles and precursor to the long-serving Delta series of rockets. Within five hours, President Dwight D. Eisenhower viewed photos from TIROS’ second orbit and declared it “a marvelous development.”
Performance
The experimental mission had a planned operational lifetime of 90 days, coming up just short at 78 days because of an electrical failure. In that time, snapping photos every 10 to 30 seconds when activated, TIROS-1 generated nearly 23,000 images of Earth across a belt that stretched from the latitudes of Montreal, Canada, south to southern Argentina, capturing phenomena including a tropical storm, an extratropical cyclone in the Gulf of Alaska, and pack ice conditions in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern Canada. TIROS also detected and counted particles in cosmic radiation and studied heat transfer between the tropics and polar regions. Built before protocols for deorbiting derelict spacecraft, all 10 TIROS satellites remain in orbit today.
Specifications
The spacecraft contained one wide-angle and one narrow-angle TV camera, two magnetic video recorders for storing photographs while out of range of its two ground stations, a command-and-control electronics system, a communication system, solid-fuel rockets for spin control, a power supply with rechargeable batteries and a cylindrical solar array. It weighed 122 kilograms, about as much as entertainer Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and measured 1.1 meters in diameter and 0.6 meters high, not counting antennas at the top and bottom. Made of aluminum alloy and stainless steel, TIROS-1 was covered by 9,200 solar cells for charging the batteries.
Inspirations
As early as 1939, George Mindling, a visionary and poetic Weather Bureau official, predicted the dawn of weather satellites in verses such as this: “Photographs will be made by the infra red light/That will show us the clouds both by day and by night.” During the 1950s, meteorologists such as Harry Wexler — the first scientist to fly deliberately into a hurricane and chief scientist with the Weather Bureau — suggested capturing images of meteorological phenomena from satellites launched into space by powerful rockets.
