At this point a number of Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers began to
analyze Telstar’s troubles. As you can imagine, we had a rather
difficult problem. We obviously could neither go up and look at Telstar
nor bring it down for an overhaul on the ground. We could only send
different commands to the satellite and watch the telemetry data to see
what, if anything, happened.
After checking the satellite’s other equipment, we were happy to find
that everything except the command chains was in good condition. So we
decided the trouble had to be one of five possibilities:
—_excessive electronic “noise” in the satellite, which had blocked the
command receivers;_
—_extreme temperature variations, which had caused a joint to expand,
contract, and finally break;_
—_a loose connection;_
—_slow aging of an electronic component;_
—_deterioration of a component from excessive radiation bombardment._
We could quickly narrow this list down. Telemetry indicated that the
receiver was not being blocked by noise. Reports from the
temperature-measuring thermistors told us that inside the satellite the
temperature was 75 degrees Fahrenheit, just as it should be. A loose
connection was very unlikely, because every one had been made by expert
wiremen, examined by trained inspectors, and then completely
encapsulated in polyurethane foam. Aging also seemed very improbable,
since all the components had been individually tested and selected for
the highest reliability and longest life.