from the Copernicus-and-a-platypus-walk-into-a-bar dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
At 6:28 a.m. EDT on Aug. 21, 1972, NASA's Copernicus satellite, the heaviest and most complex space telescope of its time, lit up the sky as it ascended into orbit from Launch Complex 36B at what is now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
Initially known as Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) C, it became OAO 3 once in orbit in the fashion of the time. But it was also renamed to honor the 500th anniversary of the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543). The Polish astronomer formulated a model of the solar system with the Sun in the central position instead of Earth, breaking with 1,300 years of tradition and triggering a scientific revolution.
Fitted with the largest ultraviolet telescope ever orbited at the time as well as four co-aligned X-ray instruments, Copernicus was arguably NASA's first dedicated multiwavelength astronomy observatory. This makes it a forebear of operating satellites like NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which watches the sky in visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray light.
[...] Copernicus returned UV and X-ray observations for 8.5 years before its retirement in 1981, and it still orbits Earth today. It departed space astronomy's center stage as more advanced observatories appeared, notably Einstein and the International Ultraviolet Explorer, which launched in 1978 and operated for nearly 19 years. Copernicus observations appear in more than 650 scientific papers. Its instruments studied some 450 unique objects targeted by more than 160 investigators in the United States and 13 other countries.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday August 23 2022, @02:46PM (5 children)
How about this for a top 10 list of the most well known space exploration programs/missions/devices?
1. Apollo 11
2. Hubble Space Telescope
3. Voyager 2
4. ISS
5. Space Shuttle
6. James Webb Space Telescope
7. Sputnik
8. Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity
9. Vostok 1
10. Cassini Huygens
Some others to mention are New Horizons, Voyager 1, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. the 4 other probes on the way out of the solar system, the Soviet Venera missions, MESSENGER, Apollo 13, Dawn, Viking, Galileo, Juno, and Ulysses. And let's not forget the hundreds of ground based observatories.
But in all that, I'd never even heard a peep about Copernicus.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday August 23 2022, @04:23PM (4 children)
The fact that you hadn't heard about it - or remembered it - is probably to do with age. I can recall it being launched and, although it has been surpassed many times since by ever more capable missions, it caused quite a stir in its day.
I suspect that you are somewhat younger than I am. Its productive life would have been over by anyone younger than 40 years old, and even if you had be born you might still be too young to appreciate the achievement it represented at the time. Its capabilities will seem quite limited when compared to today's systems. It was only one step, but a very important one, along the path of space exploration and discovery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2022, @06:32PM
The NASA page for this story [nasa.gov] is very informative.
Especially the period descriptive video [youtu.be] using that narrative voice (Phil Tonkin [wikipedia.org]) that one would instantly recognize from around that time. From the video you can see that this wasn't some small satellite either, at least if you include the telescope barrel.
And even better are all the pics and text shown here [nasa.gov].
What I can't find are any image gallerys for the mission. Clearly this was before the NASA PR office had hired anyone for that kind of thing. :)
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday August 23 2022, @10:07PM (1 child)
Most people will never have heard of IRAS [wikipedia.org] either, the first infrared observatory in space.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2022, @10:50PM
Don't worry, we've heard of it [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by StupendousMan on Wednesday August 24 2022, @12:44AM
In the mid-eighties, I spent several years in an office in the basement of Peyton Hall, the home of the Astrophysical Sciences Building at Princeton. All around me, on shelf after shelf, were cardboard boxes full of punch cards with data from Copernicus. I never tried to read any of them, but they did lend the office a certain gravitas. And atmosphere :-)