The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

320 Pickering, William Hayward
Pickering, William Hayward (1910–)
The New Zealand–born director of JPL (Jet Propulsion
Laboratory) for the first two decades of the Space Age.
Pickering obtained his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering,
then a Ph.D. in physics, from the California
Institute of Technology before becoming a professor of
electrical engineering there in 1946. In 1944, he organized
the electronics efforts at JPL to support guided missile
research and development, becoming project manager
for the Corporal, the first operational missile to
come out of JPL. He served as JPL’s director (1954–1976),
overseeing development of the first American satellite
(Explorer 1), the first successful American circumlunar
space probe (Pioneer 4), the Mariner flights to Venus
and Mars in the early to mid-1960s, the Ranger photographic
missions to the Moon in 1964 to 1965, and the
Surveyor lunar landings of 1966 to 1967.
picket ship
An oceangoing ship used on a missile range to provide
additional instrumentation for tracking or recovering
missiles.
picosat
A satellite with an on-orbit mass of less than 1 kg (see
satellite mass categories). Several experimental picosats
have already been launched including DARPA’s
Picosat-1A and -1B and Santa Clara University’s Artemis
Picosat—all released by OPAL (Orbiting Picosat Automatic
Launcher) in January 2000.
William Pickering Left to
right: Pickering, former JPL
director, Theodore von Karman,
JPL cofounder, and Frank J.
Malina, cofounder and first
director of JPL. NASA
Pierce, John Robinson (1910–2002)
A leading applied physicist who is commonly referred to
as the father of the communications satellite for his work
on it in 1954 (although the concept had first been suggested
by Arthur C. Clarke). Pierce worked for 35 years as
an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he
coined the term “transistor,” and then at the California
Institute of Technology and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
He urged NASA to build a satellite based on his
design, and it was launched in 1960 as Echo 1. The project’s
success led to the construction and 1962 launch of
the first commercial communications satellite, Telstar 1.
piggyback experiment
An experiment that rides along with the primary experiment
on a space-available basis, without interfering with
the mission of the primary experiment.
Pioneer
See article, pages 321–323.
pitch
The movement about an axis that is perpendicular to the
vehicle’s longitudinal axis and horizontal with respect to
a primary body. See roll and yaw. Pitch attitude is the orientation
of a spacecraft with respect to the pitch axis. The
pitching moment is the rising and falling of a spacecraft’s
nose. When the nose rises, the pitching moment is positive;
when the nose drops, the pitching moment is negative
and is also called a diving moment.