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

370 Seamans, Robert C., Jr.
vehicle, NPO Energia provides the third stage, and Boeing
provides the payload fairing and systems integration.
Seamans, Robert C., Jr. (1918–)
An aerospace engineer and administrator who served as
deputy administrator of NASA, president of the National
Academy of Engineering, and most recently as dean of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s)
School of Engineering. Seamans earned a B.S. at Harvard
(1939), an M.S. in aeronautics at MIT (1942), and an
Sc.D. in instrumentation at MIT (1951). From 1955 to
1958, he worked at RCA, first as manager of the Airborne
Systems Laboratory and later as chief engineer of the
Missile Electronics and Controls Division. From 1948 to
1958, he also served on technical committees of NACA
(National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), NASA’s
predecessor. He served as a consultant to the Scientific
Advisory Board of the U.S. Air Force from 1957 to 1959,
as a member of the board from 1959 to 1962, and as an
associate advisor from 1962 to 1967. He was a national
delegate to the Advisory Group for Aerospace Research
and Development (NATO) from 1966 to 1969. In 1960,
Seamans joined NASA as associate administrator. In
1965, he became deputy administrator, and also served as
acting administrator. During his years at NASA he
worked closely with the Department of Defense in
research and engineering programs and served as cochairman
of the Astronautics Coordinating Board.
Seasat
A NASA/JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) satellite that
carried out the first remote sensing of Earth’s oceans
using synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The mission ended
on October 10, 1978, due to a failure of the vehicle’s electric
power system. Although only about 42 hours of realtime
data was received, the mission proved the feasibility
of using microwave sensors to monitor ocean conditions
and laid the groundwork for future SAR missions. As well
as the SAR, Seasat’s payload included: a scatterometer to
measure wind speed and direction; a multichannel microwave
radiometer to measure surface wind speed, ocean
surface temperature, atmospheric water vapor content,
rain rate, and ice coverage; and a visible and infrared
radiometer to identify cloud, land, and water features and
to provide ocean thermal images.
Launch
Date: June 27, 1978
Vehicle: Atlas F
Site: Vandenberg Air Force Base
Orbit: 761 × 765 km × 108.0°
Size: 21.0 × 1.5 m including antenna
Mass: 2,300 kg
Seastar/SeaWiFS
An Earth observation satellite that has a single instrument:
the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS),
designed to monitor the color of the world’s oceans. Various
colors indicate the presence of different types and
quantities of marine phytoplankton, which play a role in
the exchange of critical elements and gases between the
atmosphere and oceans. Seastar monitors subtle changes
in the ocean’s color to assess changes in marine phytoplankton
levels and provides data to better understand
how these changes affect the global environmental and
the oceans’ role in the carbon cycle and other biogeochemical
cycles. The satellite was built and launched and
is operated by Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC),
who sell the data collected to NASA. NASA then retains
all rights to data for research purposes, while OSC
retains all rights for commercial and operational purposes.
The mission, now renamed OrbView-2, is a
follow-on to the Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS)
and the first spacecraft in NASA’s EOS (Earth Observing
System).
Launch
Date: August 1, 1997
Vehicle: Pegasus-XL
Site: Vandenberg Air Force Base
Orbit: 707 × 708 km × 98.2°
Seawinds
A specialized microwave radar, known as a scatterometer,
that measures near-surface wind velocity (both speed and
direction) under all weather and cloud conditions over
Earth’s oceans. Built by JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory),
it was carried aboard QuikScat in 1999 and is scheduled
to fly on the Japanese ADEOS-2 satellite.
SECOR (Sequential Collation of Range)
Small U.S. Army geodetic satellites launched in the 1960s
to determine the precise location of points on the Earth’s
surface (notably islands in the Pacific). Each SECOR
satellite was linked to four ground stations—three at geographical
points where the coordinates had been accurately
surveyed and a fourth at the location whose
coordinates were to be pinpointed. Radio waves were sent
from the ground stations to the satellite and returned by a
transponder. The position of the satellite at any time was
fixed by the measured ranges from the three known stations.
Using these precisely established positions as a base,
ranges from the satellite to the unknown station were used
to compute the position of the unknown station. SECOR
allowed continents and islands to be brought within the
same geodetic global grid. Experiments with SECOR led