Your random space fact of the week is that Sunday marked the 63rd anniversary of the first satellite launched by the USA.

On January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 was launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed the mission payload in a remarkably fast 3 months.  According to NASA, The scientific instrument carried on Explorer 1 was a cosmic ray detector designed to measure the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Once in space, this experiment, provided by Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, revealed a much lower cosmic ray count than expected. Van Allen theorized that the instrument may have been saturated by very strong radiation from a belt of charged particles trapped in space by Earth’s magnetic field. The existence of these radiation belts was confirmed by another U.S. satellite launched two months later, and they became known as the Van Allen Belts in honor of their discoverer.

Explorer 1 transmitted for 6 months and decayed out of Earth orbit in March 1970, 12 years after launch.

We’ve come a long way in 63 years. Heck, we’ve come a long way in the past week with SpaceX’s SN9 and bluShift’s launch from Maine.

Space is hard, but awesome advances are happening. And we’ll report them as they happen.

More Information

Explorer-1 info page (NASA)