What was the diameter of sputnik

In the summer of , Janis Joplin was a drifter; four years later, she was a rock-and-roll legend. Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Created by Darren Star and A cargo plane crashes into an apartment building near an airport in Amsterdam, Holland, on October 4, Four people aboard the plane and approximately more in the apartment building lost their lives in the disaster. An El-Al Boeing cargo jet was scheduled to bring Televangelist Jim Bakker is indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud and of conspiring to defraud the public.

The case against the founder of Praise the Lord PTL Ministries and three of his aides exploded in the press when it was revealed that Bakker had sex with President Abraham Lincoln observes a balloon demonstration near Washington, D. Both Confederate and Union armies experimented with using balloons to gather military intelligence in the early stages of the war, but the balloons proved to be dangerous and impractical for most Some 7, mourners attended her funeral.

Smith had been killed a few days before when the old Packard she was driving hit a parked truck near Coahoma, Mississippi, between On October 4, , Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributes to his combat units a report by the U. Find out how to celebrate World Space Week here.

The launch the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 on Oct. Here are a few fun facts you may not know about Sputnik 1 and its brief but world-changing mission. Sputnik 1 weighed lbs.

This measure refers to the satellite's body; Sputnik 1 also featured two double-barreled antennas, the larger of which was So, the satellite was quite small compared to the spacecraft of today, such as NASA's Cassini Saturn orbiter, which was about the size of a school bus. But lofting something as heavy as Sputnik 1 was quite a feat in October Two months later, the United States tried to launch its first satellite — the 3.

Soviet space officials had wanted the nation's first satellite to be much bigger than a beach ball. The original plan called for lofting a nearly 3,lb. But development of this satellite, code-named "Object D," progressed more slowly than expected, and Soviet officials grew increasingly worried that the United States might beat them to space.

So, they decided to precede the launch of Object D with a "simplest satellite," or "prosteishy sputnik" in Russian. The literal translation of "sputnik," by the way, is "traveling companion. The antennas looked like long "whiskers" pointing to one side. It had two radio transmitters 20 and 40 MHz and is believed to have orbited Earth at a height of about km miles.

Analysis of the radio signals was used to gather information about the electron density of the ionosphere. Temperature and pressure were encoded in the duration of radio beeps, indicating the satellite was not punctured by a meteorite. Sputnik 1 was launched by an R-7 rocket. It incinerated upon re-entry on January 3, Sputnik was the first of several satellites in the Soviet Union 's Sputnik program , the majority of them successful.

Sputnik 2 followed as the second satellite in orbit, also the first to carry an animal, the dog Laika. The first failure occurred with Sputnik 3. Mission The Sputnik 1 spacecraft was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome at Tyuratam km southwest of the small town of Baikonur in Kazakhstan , then part of the Soviet Union.

The Russian word "Sputnik" means "travel companion" "satellite" in the astronomical sense. It was planned as a contribution to the International Geophysical Year , with three of the five Sputnik satellites reaching orbit during that period.