Re: How To Build Your Own Sputnik from the BBC

On Oct 22, 1:26 pm, robert casey <wa2...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[ Sputnik ] sent its famous ``beep beep'' radio
signals to earth, altering the transmission to
indicate changes in temperature or a sudden drop
in pressure caused by a puncture in the satellite's
case. And that's about it.

I don't remember hearing of Sputnik being intended to signal
any kind of data like temperature or pressure except by the way that
changes in those conditions might alter the electrical properties of
the equipment inside. It seems like that would have frustrated the
attempts of (United States) people to project its orbit by the Doppler
effect on its transmission as well, but I could easily have forgotten
or missed descriptions of that complication in the past.

Supposedly, the Russians were working on a fancy satellite, which later
was flown as Sputnik 3, but wanted to throw something simple and quick
together to score being the first to orbit a satellite. So they built a
simple transmitter and a set of batteries, probably using sub-minature
vacuum tubes (as transistors were not at the time capable of running at
40MHz, one of the frequencies they used). And they used a pressurized
environment to help cool it. And they decided to use some sort of
pressure indicator to vary the rate of the beeping, to see if
micrometeorites were common enough to puncture it. You want to know
that before flying men up there. So that was the entire science mission
IIRC.

Mikhail Tikonravov did an article I have somewhere that was the first
unabiguous claim I saw that the Sputnik had varied the signal to send
some basic telemetry. I think it's fairly well established by now in
memoirs by Chertok and others. When I was writing THE FIRST SPACE
RACE (Texas A&M, 2004), it seeed solid enough that I included it. It
was not clear to those receiving the "beeps" in the West in 1957
whether there was information in them or not.

Regards,
Matt Bille

.

Relevant Pages

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