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Pioneer 4 at 60! (links)
Hello All,
Tomorrow (Sunday, March 3) will mark a little-heralded but nonetheless significant space milestone. Sixty years ago one of NASA's earliest deep-space missions occurred, when a Juno II boosted the U.S. Army/JPL-developed Pioneer 4 spacecraft into a lunar flyby trajectory, which resulted in the tiny, conical vehicle--and its spent fourth stage motor case and two yo-yo de-spin weights and wires--becoming the first U.S.-made objects of any size to escape from Earth. (On October 16, 1957, small metal pellets fired from an Aerobee sounding rocket became the first human-made objects ever to escape from the Earth, see: http://www.google.com/search?source...160.OKc1FMxvCFw ). Also: The Juno II consisted of a "stretched" Jupiter IRBM, topped by the same three "1 atop 3, inside 11" spin-stabilized "washtub" solid propellant upper stages that were used in the Jupiter-C/Juno I, which orbited the earliest Explorer satellites. Pioneer 4 achieved a lunar flyby, but a more distant one (about 37,300 miles) than planned, due to small velocity and aiming errors during the firing of the Juno II's high-velocity solid propellant upper stage motors. Despite the off-nominal aim and a slightly low injection velocity, Pioneer 4 returned superb radiation date out to over 400,000 miles before its batteries were exhausted, and it entered a 398-day, 0.98 x 1.13 AU (Astronomical Unit) solar orbit, inclined 1.5 degrees to the ecliptic, and: If anyone here has built a Juno II (Pioneer 4 round) scale model, this Sunday would be a particularly appropriate occasion on which to launch it. (Peter Alway included plans for a Juno II scale model in his now-online 1994 book, "The Art of Scale Model Rocketry," see pages 62 and 63 *here*: http://nar.org/free-reports/Art%20o...r%2 0Alway.pdf , and his "Rockets of the World" contains scale data on several Juno II rounds, including the Pioneer 4 one.) Below are links to material on Pioneer 4 and its Juno II launch vehicle (which includes a downloadable card stock Pioneer 4 model): Wikipedia article (containing additional links): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_4 YouTube videos: http://www.youtube.com/results?sear...ioneer+4+launch Pioneer 4 paper models: http://www.google.com/search?ei=T5B...299.fQ6mYIJ1h6c Articles, images, and videos: http://www.google.com/search?source... 9.nagIzxkLZqM I hope this material will be useful.
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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185 http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050 http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511 All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com. NAR #54895 SR |
#2
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Dr. Zooch made a nice Juno II model as well, but I haven't built it yet.
Very cool stuff. Later! OL J R
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Quote:
A few ham operators have built 1:1 scale, working models of OSCAR 1, the first amateur radio satellite. Pioneer 4 is so small and simple (it has a 0.1 watt phase modulated 960.05 MHz transmitter, two Geiger–Müller tubes, a two-photocell optical switch [flown as an engineering test], and a ring of Mercury "D" batteries for power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_4 ) that a 3D printed working replica of it would also be easy to make. At its tiny 0.1 watt transmitter output power, fed through its nearly-omnidirectional cone-spike antenna, the Goldstone tracking station was still able to achieve signal lockup as Pioneer 4 rose above the mountains, over 199,000 miles away in space! Plus: Pioneer 3/4's cone-spike antenna was later used on each of the Block II Ranger lunar probes (Ranger 3, 4, and 5), serving as the boom-mounted low-gain antenna.
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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185 http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050 http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511 All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com. NAR #54895 SR |
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