Final Report on the TIROS I Meteorological Satellite System

Goddard Space Flight Center

Jan 1962 · National Aeronautics and Space Administration

About this ebook

This report is divided into two parts: Part I includes the design, development, operation, and engineering evaluation of Tiros I; Part II is concerned with the meteorological uses of the television data. The developments leading to the design of the Tiros I meteorological satellite, the technical design and development of the Tiros I spacecraft and its instruments, the details of launch, tracking, and data acquisition, and an engineering evaluation of the satellite system and its instrumentation are described in detail in Chapters 1-7. The uses of the television pictures from Tiros I are discussed in a series of 11 articles (Chapters 8-18) by the staff members of the U.S. Weather Bureau, Meteorological Satellite Laboratories. Methods for using cloud pictures to identify synoptic scale and mesoscale phenomena and limited detection of wind patterns are described in case studies. Appendix A shows some of the basic photogrammetry used to locate geographically the cloud features in the television pictures.