The Annals of the IGY at the American Philosophical Society

I was away for a week, helping son #1 get ready to move back east from California. On the way home, I spent a day in Philadelphia and visited (as an official researcher) the American Philosophical Society Library. It has a full 48-volume set of the Annals of the IGY, not to be confused with the Bulletin of the IGY which I have been reviewing.

According to the APS website,

The American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin [more on him below] for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge.” ... We serve scholars through a research library of manuscripts and other collections internationally recognized for their enduring historic value. 

APS Library building

The Annals series was described in Science, Vol. 125, No. 3260 (Jun. 21, 1957), p. 1239:

Pergamon Press has announced publication of the Annals of the International Geophysical Year, which will be the official journal of the IGY Central Committee (CSAGI). The Annals will describe the inception, the planning, the preparations, and the program of the IGY, and in due course the progress and some of the main results. 

Harold Spencer Jones will serve as general editor with the aid of an editorial advisory board that consists of A. H. Shapley (World Days), J. Van Miegheim (meteorology), V. Laursen (geomagnetism ), S. Chapman (aurora and airglow), W. J. G. Beynon (ionosphere), Y. Ohman (solar activity), J. A. Simpson (cosmic rays ), A. Danjon (longitude and latitude ), James Wordie (glaciology), G. Laclavere (oceanography), L. V. Berkner (rockets and satellites), V. V. Beloussov (seismology), P. Lejay ( gravity measurement), and M. Nicolet (nuclear radiation).

 It is anticipated that from four to six volumes of the Annals will be published during 1957 and 1958. Subscription rates are £6 or $17 per volume.

ScienceDirect makes the title and subject index from volume 48 of the Annals publicly available.

The first couple of volumes of the Annals that I looked at were intimidating in scope and length (maybe 10,000 pages total). I will peruse further volumes in future visits to the Library, and likely use some supplementary material, but I think the IGY Bulletin will remain my primary guide to the doings of the IGY.

I received a small grant from the American Philosophical Society early in my career: "Archaeomagnetic Secular Variation and Dating in Israel" ($2100, 1986). It covered most of my expenses for a short visit to Israel to collect some archaeomagnetic samples, and lay the groundwork for further work in this area. I appreciated that assistance from the APS, and now the use of its research library. 

F&M seal

Benjamin Franklin was honored in the name of Franklin College, now Franklin & Marshall College after merging with (John) Marshall College, for providing £200 in seed money for its establishment in 1787. I spent most of my career at F&M, teaching there for 33 years.

First day cover from my collection "franked" with the Ben Franklin stamp (Scott #1073, 1956) commemorating the 250th anniversary of Franklin's birth. Franklin was Postmaster General of [colonial] America from 1753-1774.

This postcard that I own shows the painting Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky by Benjamin West (1816), on which the above stamp design is based.

I just noticed that a Ken Burns two-part documentary on Benjamin Franklin premiers on PBS next week. Could be worth watching!

IGY Bulletin, Number 9, March 1958 - First US-IGY satellite

On to the IGY Bulletin issue #9 from March, 1958. The download of this 16-page issue from the AGU website can be found here. The articles in this issue are:

1. First US-IGY satellite
2. Phototrack
3. Life sciences in the IGY
4. Cruise of the Brown Bear

Here I will summarize the first article. In an earlier post, I wrote about the successful launch into orbit of Explorer 1 on the anniversary of that historic event. This Bulletin article starts by summarizing rocket and satellite characteristics. The payload instrumentation was for measuring the cosmic ray intensity, the density of meteoric matter, and temperatures inside and on the skin of the satellite. A geiger counter was used to measure cosmic rays. Impact of solid meteoric particles was measured by a microphone and also by erosion gages based on changes in electrical characteristics. Thermal probes measured temperatures.

A schematic of the 80" long satellite, scanned from the article, is shown below:

Two radio transmitters allowed tracking by the Minitrack system. A telescopic sighting was reported from the Moonwatch team in Alamogordo, NM, and a naked-eye sighting reported from a Moonwatch team in Manhattan, KS. The latter reported the brightness to be that of a fifth-magnitude star, about 15 times dimmer than Polaris (the North Star).

In my post from a month ago, I showed the stamp that was finally issued at the turn of the 20th century to commemorate this launch, somewhat ignored until then because the U.S. was second into space. I have now acquired covers with cachets postmarked on the 15th (1973), 20th (1978), and 25th (1983) anniversaries of the launch, shown below.

One of 100 covers from the Smithsonian Milestones of Flight series, Stamp is the IGY president Eisenhower 8¢ (Scott #1393, 1970).

The 20th anniversary cover is franked with the 13¢ Kennedy definitive (Scott #1287, an older stamp from 1967).

This cover was not postmarked, but has a cancellation honoring the launch of Explorer 1. The cachet showing the rocket, satellite, and Wernher von Braun actually seems to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the founding of NASA, later in the year on 1 Oct. 1958. The 20¢ stamp shows the U.S. flag (Scott #1894, 1981).

The 15th anniversary cover included a small leaflet from the National Air and Space Museum. 

It stated that Explorer 1's cosmic ray measurements showed a lower than anticipated cosmic ray count. James Van Allen (who signed another Explorer 1 cover shown earlier) suggested the reading was spurious because the instrument had been saturated by a strong belt of radiation trapped in the Earth's magnetic field. This was to be verified by the Explorer 3 satellite, launched on 26 March 1958, one of the most significant findings of the IGY.

IGY Bulletin, Number 8, February 1958 - Thule neutron monitor station

One last short article from this issue of the IGY Bulletin.

The Thule (Greenland) neutron monitor station was built for the IGY in 1957 by the Bartol Research Foundation. It was operated by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which is in charge of communications and information systems support for the armed forces. Martin Pomerantz, president of the Bartol at the time, provided the material for this article.

The Bartol Research Institute is a research center in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware (a 90-minute drive from my location in Lancaster, PA). The Bartol Research Institute currently operates 10 neutron monitor stations as part of the Neutron Monitor Program. Thule, which was put into operation on 27 Aug. 1957 during the IGY, is still running.

Thule neutron monitor, oldest of the monitors operated by Bartol Research Institute. The neutron detector tubes are inside the four white boxes (photo by J Roth, Bartol).

As a reminder of what was in an earlier post, the Bartol says: A neutron monitor is an instrument that measures the number of high-energy particles impacting Earth from space. For historical reasons these particles, mostly protons and helium nuclei, are called "cosmic rays." Because the intensity of cosmic rays hitting Earth is not geographically uniform, it is important to place neutron monitors at multiple locations in order to yield a complete picture of cosmic ray influxes. The neutrons are secondary spallation products derived from cosmic rays interacting with molecules in the atmosphere.

The article goes on to say that the Thule station, 1500 miles from the North Pole, was important because it was closer to the geomagnetic pole than any other neutron monitor. Cosmic rays can more easily funnel in towards the Earth's surface through the openings at the magnetic poles.

The secondary protons and neutrons produced in the atmosphere by cosmic rays are stable, so they provide much information about the distribution of cosmic rays and the geomagnetic field. The neutron fluxes vary with cosmic ray intensity; on the one hand they correlate with flares on the sun which emit cosmic rays, but on the other hand are inversely related to the solar cycle and solar magnetic fields when high (low) heliomagnetic fields shield (don't shield) galactic cosmic rays from reaching the Earth. Bartol gives a thorough explanation.

Thule has a fascinating history as: the home to indigenous Inughuit; the site of a secret U.S. airbase; the main staging point for the construction of Camp Century; the site of a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) outpost, with radar in order to warn North America of a transpolar missile attack from either the USSR mainland or of submarine-launched missiles from the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans.

A philatelic aside on Thule: I was looking at eBay to see if I could find any relevant stamps or covers. I found listings of five 1937 stamps from Thule. Apparently, stamps for regular mail were not issued from the town of Thule (now Qaanaaq) until 1938. The 1937 "local" stamps were privately printed by the Thule Committee in memory of polar explorer Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933) on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the most northerly trading post in the world, the Thule Trading station. These stamps are not listed in the Scott catalogue, but you can find them in Colnect.

Thule stamps, not in my collection (Quora)

First successful Vanguard satellite launch into orbit, March 17, 1958

Let's commemorate the second successful U.S. satellite launch, Vanguard 1, on this date in 1958.

The U.S. had two competing satellite programs during the IGY, Explorer and Vanguard.

Project Vanguard was a program managed by the United States Navy Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), which intended to launch the first artificial satellite into low Earth orbit using a Vanguard rocket. The Navy proposal included all three aspects of the mission: launch vehicle, payload satellite, and ground tracking stations. 

In response to the launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 Oct. 1957, the U.S. revived the Explorer program, directed by Wernher von Braun under the aegis of the the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA). 

Ironically, the Air Force proposal was not pursued.

As discussed in an earlier post, the first three-stage Vanguard test rocket, TV-3, was launched on 6 Dec. 1957, but lost thrust, settled back on the launch pad, and exploded. The next Vanguard launch on 5 Feb 1958 flew for just 1 minute the vehicle lost control and then  broke up.

Meanwhile, ABMA, together with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), built Explorer 1 and successfully launched the first U.S. satellite on 1 Feb. 1958, as discussed in this post.

On 17 March 1958, Vanguard 1, aka TV-4, became the second artificial satellite successfully placed in Earth orbit by the United States. Three times a charm! It was the first solar cell powered satellite. Just 6" in diameter and weighing 3 lb., Vanguard 1 was much smaller than Sputniks 1 and 2, hence dubbed as the "grapefruit satellite" by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Vanguard 1, and the upper stage of its launch vehicle, are the oldest artificial satellites still in space, as Vanguard's predecessors, Sputnik 1, Sputnik 2, and Explorer 1, have decayed from orbit. Primary scientific objectives of this mission were to determine atmospheric density and the shape of the earth. The solar powered transmitter operated until May, 1964.

Below is a cover from my collection postmarked from Cape Canaveral on the 15th anniversary of Vanguard 1's launch. The cahet shows images of the rocket and satellite. The stamp is Scott #1402 (1971), bearing the image of Dwight Eisenhower, who had been president during the IGY. It is signed by John P. Hagen, director of the Vanguard program.

Cover from my collection for the 15th anniversary of the Vanguard 1 launch

Scott Manley has a nice YouTube video on these two programs and their launches:

My first real job out of college with Fairchild Space and Electronics Co. was in the space power subsystems group. We designed and sometimes fabricated solar cell array-battery power subsystems for satellites, a legacy of the Vanguard 1 mission.

IGY Bulletin, Number 8, February 1958 - IGY satellite program notes

Just a 1-page article to summarize today. It is a reprint of a short piece by Hugh Odishaw, titled "Soviet satellite carrier rocket," from Science magazine, vol. 126, no. 3287, 27 Dec. 1957, p. 1334.

It reports that on 8 Dec. 1957 a cable was sent by A. N. Nesmeyanov, chief scientific secretary of the Soviet Union, to Detlev Bronk, the president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The letter stated that some unburnt parts of the rocket that carried Sputnik 1 into space might have been scattered on a line between Alaska and the west coast of the United States (Alaska was not yet a state.) Nesmeyanov asked that any recovered pieces be returned to the USSR Academy of Sciences. Bronk responded that no such finds had been made.

According to NASA, the Sputnik 1 rocket body, a Semyorka R-7 ICBM, was the second stage, or "core booster", that carried the Sputnik satellite into orbit. The rocket body itself (about 55' high by 10' across) also reached orbit and was visible from the ground as a magnitude 1 object. In fact, this was actually the "Sputnik" people saw from the ground over the next few months. The much smaller (2' diameter) Sputnik 1 satellite was barely visible at magnitude 6, one hundred times fainter than the rocket.

Below are two depictions of the Sputnik 1 rocket from my collections.

Schematic of the Sputnik 1 rocket (source is a booklet in my collection: Soviet Sputniks, 1959, p. 28)

The Sputnik rocket and satellite depicted on North Korean stamp from my collection (Scott #134, issued 26 March 1958)

IGY Bulletin, Number 8, February 1958 - Satellite telemetry

This article in the Bulletin begins by stating that in order for non-recoverable satellites to be used for direct observations, telemetering systems must be used that record the satellite's observations, encode them, and transmit them to ground stations. Measurements can then be made in space rather than just from the ground, unhampered by the atmosphere.

Telemetry from satellites faced the extra obstacles of cost of the satellite, the need to record for long time periods, and the impossibility of maintenance. The telemetry system had to be of low weight, and have low power consumption. For the IGY program, one type of telemetry was done in real-time as data were collected, and another type used satellite-borne tape recorders. Volunteers equipped to make tape recordings of satellite signals were solicited to help with data retrieval and storage.

One gift for my bar mitzvah in 1963 was my first reel-to-reel tape recorder, as shown here.  I recorded some musical mix tapes from the radio (including My Girl from the Temptations) and exchanged letters-by-tape with a couple of friends in college. Last time I tried, the reels still moved, but the speed was not well controlled, and the playback was of poor quality. This tape recorder was almost IGY-era vintage!

The Bulletin article proceeds to describe details of telemetry systems used by IGY satellites that were collecting data on ultraviolet radiation, micro-meteoric particles, and cosmic rays. Much of the article is a little more technical than we need to go into.

The lead story in Popular Mechanics (1902-today) for the March 1958 issue was "Electronics and the IGY," the full text of which you can read here. I happen to own a copy of that issue. Below are scans of the cover and a photo from the article showing a telemetry recording system.

Scan of the cover of Popular Electronics, March 1958 issue

Scan of image in my copy of Popular Electronics. Caption: Measuring telemetered data from rockets in flight at an installation in Manitoba, Canada. At the far left is a telemetry recorder which takes data from airborne rockets; in the center is the main recorder which puts data on tape; the ballistic camera master control is at the right. 

As an aside, the term "satellite telemetry" has also been applied to a form of tracking of long-distance migrating animals used since the 1980s. After an animal has been captured and a tracking device has been attached, researchers can monitor movements of that individual for extended periods of time without having to recapture it. Satellite telemetry uses attached or implanted devices that communicate via radio signals to orbiting satellites, which give positional fixes on the device, and thus, the animal. This can replace older methods of tracking based on recapturing tagged individuals, or radio-telemetry which requires an observer to physically follow the tagged animal.

Speaking of animal migration, yesterday I made my nearly annual short-distance migration to the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area, where tens of thousands of snow geese and tundra swans layover for a couple of weeks at this time every year as part of their incredible migrations back to the far north. For the day/time we were there, the number of birds in the lake were not not that impressive. I'm not sure if they had already left the area, or were just out feeding for the day.

We did see a nice group in chevron flight

The lake was sparsely occupied by tundra swans

I only have a few videos posted on YouTube. Here is maybe my first one, from 13 years ago, pretty low quality, showing some of the snow geese at Middle Creek:

IGY Bulletin, Number 8, February 1958 - A report on the United States Program

This IGY Bulletin article is a brief account of some activities in the U.S. IGY Program during its first five months (or about the first 1/4 of the 18-month IGY), from July 1 to Nov. 30, 1957. So it is effectively a review of things reported in the IGY Bulletin to date, some of which have been mentioned in previous posts. It is condensed from an article, "International Geophysical Year: A report on the United States Program," by Hugh Odishaw, Science, vol. 127. issue #3290, pp. 115-128, Jan. 17, 1958. I've mentioned Hugh Odishaw, executive director of the U.S. National Committee for the IGY, in a previous post. I own this press photo (stamped on the back  as UPI, 12/29/58) of him, taken at the end of the IGY.

You can download a pdf of Odishaw's article here. The backgrounds on some of the projects it describes have been provided in previous posts. Below I will bullet-point some of the highlights of the Bulletin’s 8-page article, using headings and subheadings from that article. 

Physics of the Upper Atmosphere

Solar activity

• The first major solar flare observed as part the IGY program was on 28 June 1957 (just before the official start of the IGY), leading to an Alert concerning the probability of solar disturbances.
• Measurements at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California found that the magnetic field at the sun's surface is about 10,000 times greater than that of the Earth.
• Magnetic observatories confirmed the existence of the equatorial electro-jet, a large but narrow electric current circling the Earth's equator high in the atmosphere.

Aurora and airglow

• The most complete synoptic maps ever of auroral displays were compiled, including the first confirmation that auroral displays at the north and south poles were synchronous.

Cosmic rays

• The "cosmic ray equator," where the cosmic ray intensity is a minimum, was found to deviate from the geomagnetic equator, perhaps due to cosmic ray deflections by extraterrestrial magnetic fields.
• With the first launch of an IGY test rocket on 5 July 1956 from Wallop's Island, Virginia, 83 rockets had been launched so far during the IGY, revealing atmospheric temperature, pressure, density, and ionization profiles.
• The launches of Sputniks 1 and 2 represented an extension of rockets' probing of the high atmosphere. 
• The U.S. was developing two types of satellites: test spheres for the testing of the Vanguard rocket system, and instrumented satellites to be later used with Vanguard and Jupiter-C rockets.

Earth's Heat and Water Regimen

Meteorology

• Synoptic meteorological maps of Antarctica were prepared for the first time, and continued on a daily basis.
• The South Pole Station, 10,000 feet above sea level, reported the lowest temperature ever recorded, -102.1 °F.
• Weather balloons were sent to altitudes of as much as 80,000 feet (15 miles) over Antarctica.
• Atmospheric ozone was measured in Antarctica for the first time, the beginning of a database that showed progressively decreasing levels of atmospheric ozone. In the 1980s, this depletion of ozone was attributed to the release of chlorofluorocarbon pollutants, garnering the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for  Paul J. Crutzen, Mario J. Molina, and F. Sherwood Rowland.

Ozone ground measurements (black circles) starting at the time of the IGY, and later measurements above Antarctica (NASA)

• Carbon dioxide, "another minor constituent of the atmosphere which may play a role in climatic changes," was also measured in Antarctica. A summary of early analyses of carbon dioxide in Antarctic air collected in glass flasks at the South Pole between 17 May 1957 and 6 February 1976 
  were reported and tabulated in the publication Antarctic Carbon Dioxide Project, Report No. 5 (July 15, 1976), prepared by Charles D. Keeling, J. Alexander Adams and Carl A. Ekdahl of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This level has continued to increase in Antarctica, as it has worldwide. I think we can safely remove the qualifier "may" from the quote above.

The earliest carbon dioxide measurements from Antarctica (Keeling et al., 1976)

Glaciology

• In Greenland, the U.S. Army's Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment perfected techniques for drilling holes in the ice with hollow drills to obtain ice cores. The first hole drilled in Greenland in 1956 reached a depth of over 1000'. The layers of ice provide a stratigraphy of climate, precipitation, and volcanism
• Seismic studies in Antarctica were used to ascertain thicknesses of the ice sheet. Byrd Station, at an elevation of 5000', sat atop ice almost 10,000' thick.
• Oceanographic expeditions were used among other reasons for studying mean sea level. No mention was made in the Bulletin article about the sea level rise that has been a result of global warming.

Rise in sea levels since 1900. Pre-1940, glaciers and Greenland meltwater dominated the rise; dam projects slowed the rise in the 1970s. Recently, ice sheet and glacier melt, plus thermal expansion, dominate the rise. Tide-gauge data shown in blue and satellite data in orange. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

• Geophysicists on Drifting Station A in the Arctic Ocean used seismic and gravity measurements to infer the floe had drifted over an underlying oceanic ridge which rose more than 5,000' above the ocean floor.

Earth's Structure and Interior

Seismology

• New earthquake seismographs were developed and deployed around the world, including ten long period seismographs that were especially able to detect surface waves with periods of 400 seconds, generated by only the very largest earthquakes. 
• Seismographs installed in the Pacific and Antarctic regions were to yield more complete patterns of global seismicity (which a decade later became critical for the theory of plate tectonics).
• Seismologists probed the thickened continental "roots" beneath the Andes Mountains of South America (a topic of isostasy to be blogged about at some point).
• The first successful gravity measurements were made on the open sea using a new model of gravimeter.

IGY Data

To handle the voluminous amount of data to be collected during the IGY at 2,000 stations by 10,000 scientists from 67 countries, three World Data Centers were to be established in the U.S., Europe, and the Soviet Union.

We can see that a number of strands of IGY research projects have endured, and have implications for critical issues that were barely considered at the time. That's how basic scientific research works, and why we must support it!

IGY Bulletin, Number 8, February 1958 - First sea surface gravimeter

We move on to the IGY Bulletin issue #8 from February, 1958. The download of this 20-page issue from the AGU website can be found here. The articles in this issue are:

1. First sea surface gravimeter
2. A report on the United States Program
3. Satellite telemetry
4. IGY satellite program notes
5. Thule neutron monitor station

Here I will summarize the first article. From an earlier post, gravity objectives of the IGY included:

• augmenting the global network of gravity measurements, especially in the Southern Hemisphere and polar regions
• better determination of the solid Earth's response to the tides
• enhanced measurement of gravity at sea

This article first reports on the first successful surface measurement of gravity in the open sea on Nov. 22, 1957, by J. Lamar Worzel of Lamont Geological Observatory, Columbia University. He used a Graf-Askania gravimeter developed at the Technical University of Munich by Anton Graf. The USS Compass Island provided a gyro-stabilized platform for this work.

In a basic physics course, we'd learn that the acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface is 9.8 m/s². However, because of the shape of the Earth, gravity varies on a longitudinally-averaged Earth from 9.7803267714 m/s² at the equator to 9.8321863685 m/s² at the poles, 0.5% higher, because you are closer to the Earth's center at the poles of our squashed (oblate spheroid) Earth. Gravity is also affected by elevation, local terrain, tides, moving measurement platforms (such as ships), and mass anomalies in the subsurface. Gravity surveys in geophysics are often used, after correcting for the other factors that affect gravity, to infer the nature of anomalous masses in the subsurface. Signals as small as 0.00001 m/s² (or about 1 part in 1,000,000 of the Earth's gravity field) are measurable with sensitive gravity meters (gravimeters) and can indicate significant "gravity anomalies."

Early gravimeters used on land were precision pendulum systems, since the period of a pendulum swing is related to the acceleration of gravity. Measurements at sea present a special challenge due to lack of stability and the addition of non-gravitational accelerations caused by the motions of the ship. In the 1920s, the Dutch geophysicist Vening Meinesz developed a system of two and then three balanced pendulums that were able to measure gravity underneath the sea surface by nulling out movement in the relatively quiet environment of a submarine. The later Graf instrument was basically a very sensitive spring-type balance that was able to measure gravity on the noisier platform of a ship at the surface. A measurement with the Graf could be taken in 9 hours and the data reduced in half a day, compared to two days and two weeks, respectively, for a measurement with the old pendulum systems. Today, measurements with modern gravimeters take a matter of minutes.

Seaborne gravity measurements are important since the oceans cover about 3/4 of the Earth's surface. The measurements to be made during the IGY were to fill major gaps in the extant world gravity database, especially in the polar regions and at sea, and then to meld the different national surveys together into a global grid.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) issued a set of four se-tenant geophysics (but not IGY) stamps in 1980. The 20-pfennig stamp showed a modern gravimeter and how it might be used in delineating coal-bearing sedimentary basins. I just bought the block of stamps on eBay, from where the image below comes.

GDR block Scott #2146a, including the gravity stamp (Scott #2143), upper left

On my trip to Sarasota two weeks ago, I visited parks, the beach, played golf, ate good food, went to botanical gardens. I also perused the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (yes, the circus Ringling); I was not so keen on the old Italian art, but I liked the modern art, including this 1988 piece entitled Gravity, by Yuriko Yamaguchi:

And, on my last night, I went to the see a live performance at Circus Sarasota, including this gravity-defying balancing act by daughter-father team of Annaliese and Bello Nock.

What goes up, must come down, according to gravity!