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Discovering the Cosmos with Small Spacecraft pp 51–137Cite as

Early Explorers

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Abstract

This chapter looks at the early period of the Explorer program once it was taken from the army by NASA, from Explorer 6, the first ‘NASA Explorer’, up to Explorer 55, the last officially numbered craft. The first NASA Explorers benefitted from a more powerful rocket, an upgraded Juno I. The new Juno II had greater thrust on the first stage (up from 37,640kg to 86,025kg), was 92cm longer and had 20 seconds more burn time. The upper stages, with their small, powerful but imprecise rockets, remained the same. Critically, the weight of payload that it could orbit rose from 11kg to 43kg, with a possible orbital high point (apogee) of 480km. The new Juno was highly improvised, as its imperfect reliability was to illustrate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Templeogue, Dublin, Ireland

    Brian Harvey

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  1. Brian Harvey
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Harvey, B. (2018). Early Explorers. In: Discovering the Cosmos with Small Spacecraft. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68140-5_2

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