The control system of the Sputnik Rocket was tuned to provide an orbit with the following parameters: perigee height - 223 km (139 mi), apogee height - 1,450 km (900 mi), orbital period - 101.5 min. A rocket trajectory with these parameters was calculated earlier by Georgi Grechko, ...
Sputnik 2: The First Animal in Orbit by Andrew J. LePage November 1997 The launching of Sputnik on the night of October 4, 1957 was virtually a total success. The only major malfunction was in the system that evenly empties the propellant tanks in the core and four boosters of the 8K71...
THE resistance of the air to a moving object like a satellite causes a steady decrease of the semi-major axis and eccentricity of the orbit. The motion of the satellite grows faster and the satellite itself submerges deeper and deeper into the atmosphere at every revolution. When the satellite...
In the late 1950s, after the Soviet Union successfully put their satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit, American fears over the Communist threat reached a new height. The U.S. was trailing badly in a competition that would come to define the next decade – the race to space. So on April 9...
Values of H 1 2, where = atmospheric density, H = density scale height = / d dz have been obtained from the slope of the periodtime curve, while values of H alone have come from a more novel analysis of the decrease in the perigee distance of the orbit. The resulting values of , ...
For an orbit of small eccentricity e, the rate of change of period dT/dt is given by: where 蟻p is the air density at perigee, H the atmospheric scale height, a the semi-major axis of the orbit, C D the drag coefficient (usually taken as 2) and m the mass of the satellite. ...