Bøger af Sunny Tsiao

The NASA History Program was first established in 1959 (a year after NASA itself was formed) and has continued to document and preserve the agency's remarkable history through a variety of products. The NASA History Division serves two key functions: fulfilling the mandate of the 1958 "Space Act" calling for NASA to disseminate aerospace information as widely as possible, and helping NASA managers understand and thus benefit from the study of past accomplishment and difficulties. NASA publishes documents on topics such as: Documentary History, Memoirs, Aeronautics and Space Report of the President, and many more. This is one of those documents.

Much of what has been written on the topic of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) tracking and data networks has been on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network, the DSN. This is perhaps understandable as the DSN has played and continues to play a central role in many of America's most high-profile exploration missions. These have included the early Pioneer probes, the Mariner missions of the 1960s and 1970s, Viking and Voyager, and most recently, Galileo, Cassini- Huygens, and the new generation of Mars explorers that will prepare the way for eventual human voyages to the Red Planet.

At the height of the space race, 6,000 men and women operated NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network at some two dozen locations across five continents. This network, known as the STDN, began its operation by tracking Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite that was launched into space by the former Soviet Union. Over the next 40 years, the network was destined to play a crucial role on every near-Earth space mission that NASA flew. Whether it was receiving the first television images from space, tracking Apollo astronauts to the Moon and back, or data acquiring for Earth science, the STDN was that intricate network behind the scenes making the missions possible. Some called it the "Invisible Network," a hallmark of which was that no NASA mission has ever been compromised due to a net-work failure. Read You Loud and Clear! is a historical account of the STDN, starting with its formation in the late 1950s to what it is today in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It traces the roots of the tracking network from its beginnings at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) space-based constellation of today. The story spans the early days of satellite tracking using the Minitrack Network, through the expansion of the Satellite Tracking And Data Acquisition Network (STADAN) and the Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN), and finally, to the Space and Ground Networks of today. Written from a nontechnical perspective, the author has translated a highly technical subject into historical accounts told within the framework of the U.S. space program. These accounts tell how international goodwill and foreign cooperation were crucial to the operation of the network and why the space agency chose to build the STDN the way it did. More than any-thing else, the story of NASA's STDN is about the "unsung heroes of the space program."

Delivers new insights into the behind-the-scenes drama of the space race by examining the career of Thomas Paine. Piercing the Horizon provides provocative context to current conversations on the case for reaching Mars, settling our solar system, and continuing the exploration of space.