In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, a director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) authorized the construction and launch of a small meteorological satellite to support CORONA and other film-limited imaging satellite systems. Though undertaken as an 'interim' measure while awaiting completion and launch of a national weather satellite, in the months that followed the NRO spacecraft would incorporate so many desirable features and perform so admirably that it became the template adopted for all American civil and military low altitude meteorological satellites. I researched and wrote the first installment of this history, which covered these actions and events, using available classified records while assigned temporarily to NRO headquarters in the mid 1980s. After returning to the NRO as its historian in the late 1990s, and upon declassification of the original work and endnotes in February 2000, I shared it with the early program participants and completed the story through the turn of the Millennium and the consolidation of American military and civil meteorological satellite programs into a National Polar- orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).
History of the Military Polar Orbiting Meteorological Satellite Program
2001
57 pages
Report
No indication
English
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