I'll review the last two articles in the Nov. 1957 issue of the IGY Bulletin.
1. The Special World Day Program for the IGY
I've discussed the IGY calendar in a previous post, including Regular World Days. This article focuses on Special World Days, on occasions of observed increases in solar activity that could also cause geomagnetic, ionospheric, auroral, and cosmic ray disturbances. Balloon and rocket soundings were increased during these events. The IGY World Warning Agency would send out alerts whenever solar activity, e.g., an unusually active sunspot region, was high and other disturbances were expected for the following day.
Table 1 in the article lists 45 World Warning Messages sent out during the first three month of the IGY, about one every two days. When the probability remained high for enhanced activity in the Earth environment, a Special World Interval would be declared.
Two of my U.S. IGY first day covers, not to mention the U.S. IGY stamp itself, depict solar activity. I haven't shown the first before, the cachet of which mimics the theme of the IGY stamp. The second was in an earlier post as an example of a hand colored cover.
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| FDC US139 from my collection, cachet maker unknown |
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| FDC US173 from my collection |
2. CSAGI rocket and satellite conference
There were a number of international meetings held to organize the IGY. This document on the contents of the National Academy of Sciences archives lists five CSAGI assemblies, five regional conferences, and five disciplinary conferences (if I am counting correctly). The first of these held in the U.S. was the CSAGI Rocket and Satellite Conference, in Washington, D.C., from Sept. 30 - Oct. 5, 1957.
During the closing session of the conference on Oct. 5, a brief description of the Sputnik 1 launch was given by A. A. Blagonravov. The launch from Kazakhstan had been made about 5 pm (Eastern Daylight Time) the previous day, and had been announced at a reception that evening in conjunction with the CASGI satellite conference at the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
A number of resolutions were passed, including a recommendation that the U.S. and the Soviet Union arrange for the rapid dissemination of information on satellite orbits and the sharing of publications, technical data, and instrumentation.
The first day cover below from my collection was postmarked in association with the Fifth Assembly of the CSAGI held in Moscow from July 30-August 8, 1958. That meeting discussed the practical details of IGY data collection and utilization, and held symposia at which the first results of the IGY were presented.
The Russian stamp on the cover (image below), Scott catalog #2090, was issued for the IGY. It shows the schooner Zarja which was built in Finland in 1952 for the USSR Academy of Sciences (one of 50 wooden schooners built by Finland as reparations for the Continuation War fought against the Soviet Union by Germany and Finland during World War II). The research vessel was wooden, and non-magnetic, fully equipped with Soviet-built geophysical instruments, including special shipborne magnetometers (shown on the stamp) for geomagnetic field observations. The schooner covered 60,000 miles in less than three years, crossing the Atlantic Ocean six times and the Indian Ocean five times. In doing so, it helped to delineate marine magnetic anomalies. These anomalies (a difficult concept to explain which I may return to another time) were key in developing the theory of sea-floor spreading in the 1960s.
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| Scott #2090 (USSR), from my collection |
Here is a silent video of the Zarja:
A second Soviet cover from my collection with a CSAGI V cachet is shown below:
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| International cover #200 from my collection |
The stamp on this cover is coincidentally Scott catalog #1957, issued by the Soviet Union on July 4, 1957, three days after the beginning of the IGY. It depicts the telescope at an observatory trained on a comet.
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| Scott #1957 (USSR), from my collection |
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