Sputnik and the GPS
Two fascinating stories from the launch of the first Artificial Satellite Sputnik.
To the complete shock of the western world, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. It was the first time humans managed to send an object into orbit and heralded the start of the space era and a long space cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Two fascinating side stories to the Sputnik launch.
The first was that the rocket used to launch the satellite was much more powerful than contemporary American rockets of the time. And the main reason was that the American nuclear bomb technology (Remember the Atomic bombs, America developed during WWW II) was far ahead of the Soviets. The US nuclear bombs were smaller in size but dreadful in impact.
The soviets originally designed R-7 as a missile with a very large payload as the Russians did not know how heavy their bomb would be as they still were working on there Nuclear bomb technology.
So lagging in nuclear bomb design actually helped the Soviets send a satellite up before the Americans.
The other is the two Johns Hopkins University scientists and a lunch-time conversation at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab, William Guier and George Weiffenbach.
Both of them started tracking Sputnik found they could determine its orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift of its radio signals. They figured that if a satellite’s position were known and predictable then the Doppler shift of its signals could be used to locate a receiver on Earth (The Smartphone in your hand) and one could navigate using that satellite signal. And that was the origin of what became the GPS system we use today.
Sputnik gave us the space age, it also gave us Google Maps!
References:
Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge by Asif Siddiqui
GPS History on NASA Archive.
