19721776 Club
A Delta rocket lifts off from Vandenberg carrying a camera built to photograph the whole planet
Engineers built the scanner as a backup instrument; within months it became the mission's real workhorse.
In 1972, no satellite had ever been built purely to study the Earth's surface rather than the weather or the enemy. On July 23, a Delta 0900 rocket carried the newly built ERTS-1 off the pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base into a sun-synchronous orbit between 907 and 915 kilometers up, circling the planet every 103 minutes. Aboard was a four-channel Multispectral Scanner designed by Virginia Norwood at Hughes Aircraft, meant only as a backup to a camera system called the Return Beam Vidicon. The RBV failed within two weeks. The scanner kept running for six years and transmitted over 300,000 images before the mission ended…
