For more than a month Telstar I behaved as it should, and our
communications experiments, including television broadcasts, were
resumed on January 3rd. During this time we used both normal commands
and our special notched-pulse modified commands. Whenever normal
commands became intermittent we used the modified commands to disconnect
the battery for several eclipses.
Our good fortune, however, did not last. Continued exposure to radiation
apparently led to further damage to Telstar I’s transistors. By February
14th, disconnecting the storage battery no longer returned the decoder
to normal, and we could operate only with our modified commands. And, on
the 21st, the satellite apparently misinterpreted a command,
disconnected its storage battery, and went silent. Since then, none of
our modified commands has been able to bring back its voice. There is
still a possibility that Telstar I may recover if it remains out of the
high-radiation part of space for a long enough period—but as time goes
by this appears less likely.
However, our work was not in vain. Because we pinpointed the effects of
radiation on the transistors in Telstar I, this problem was counteracted
on the Telstar II satellite launched on May 7, 1963 (see page 31). To
avoid the worst of the radiation effects, the second Telstar is in a
considerably larger orbit, which causes it to spend less time in the
heaviest high-energy Van Allen belt regions. It carries new radiation
detectors with much greater measuring capacity. And in one of Telstar
II’s command decoders we are using a new type of transistor, which we
hope will not be affected nearly as much by radiation as were the ones
in Telstar I’s ill-fated decoders.
E. Jared Reid _was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and received a B.S.
from Trinity College in 1956, a B.E.E. from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in 1957, and an M.E.E. from New York University in 1959. He
joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1957, and has worked on the
design and testing of the Time Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI)
system for the transatlantic cable, as well as on transistor circuits
for the Telstar satellite._