IGY Bulletin, Number 6, December 1957 - Volunteer participation in the IGY Earth Satellite Program

We move on to issue #6 of the IGY Bulletin, from December, 1957. A pdf of this issue (following the Nov. issue), downloaded from the Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, can be found here. This 16-page issue consists of the following articles:

1. Volunteer participation in the IGY Earth Satellite Program
2. Moonwatch observing methods
3. Whistlers and related phenomena
4. Arctic Ocean submarine ridges
5. Oceanographic island observatory in Iceland
6. Second Soviet satellite

In this post, I will review the first article, Volunteer participation in the IGY Earth Satellite Program

The launching of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, highlighted the value of volunteer efforts across the world for satellite tracking. The programs below were to be used for observing both U.S. and Soviet satellites.

The article lists four ways in which volunteers could contribute to the IGY Earth Satellite Program:

a) forming visual observation teams using simple optical instruments. These teams were organized by a special program of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, named Moonwatch (a former colleague of mine from the F&M astronomy program has a comment after the linked article). At the time of this Bulletin, over 100 such teams had been organized across the U.S., and 62 outside the U.S. It was reported that the Soviet Union had itself organized 66 such stations.

A simple (!) Moonwatch telescope used a mirror to reflect skylight upward into the objective, an arrangement that observing the sky comfortably for hours at a time. 

Moonwatch "telescope array" (Air Force Historical Research Agency)

b) establishing radio tracking stations in coordination with amateur radio clubs, universities, or other scientific groups. This effort was organized under a program called Moonbeam, a secondary network of less elaborate stations run by volunteers to complement the primary Minitrack stations mentioned in an earlier post. Moonbean enabled amateur radio operators to build a simplified version of the Naval Research Laboratory tracking stations for about $5,000 using a “Mark II” system (NASA).

c) recording telemetry signals of scientific data transmitted from satellites by radio and forwarding them to IGY centers. This was done by the same instruments that were used to do radio tracking of the satellites (b).

d) photographing satellite passages across the background star field by means of high quality cameras. A program for this has not yet been formed at the time of the article, but preliminary efforts of te Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers (renamed in 1992 as the Society for Imaging Science and Technology) had been endorsed.

These efforts would today be termed examples of citizen science. The National Park Service describes citizen science as “when the public voluntarily helps conduct scientific research. Citizen scientists may design experiments, collect data, analyze results, and solve problems. In national parks, most citizen scientists collect data with tools provided by project directors. These data help professional scientists and resource managers answer scientific questions and solve important problems. And the activity helps participants build meaningful connections to science."

The North Museum of Nature and Science, across the street from my house in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, provides opportunities to participate in a citizen science project on plant phenology.

I used the collecting website colnect to search for stamps with the phrase "citizen science." It brought up a set of four Australian stamps commemorating citizen science that were issued last year. I don't own these stamps, but I include depictions and descriptions of them below.