New Spy Satellite

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29383, 9 December 1960, Page 22

New Spy Satellite

[By

GEOFFREY TAYLOR]

They can hardly wait for it. “They” are the men who command the retaliatory power of the West, men who cannot know for sure if hostile Soviet rockets have blasted off the pads until they show up too many minutes late on the radar screens. But when they have “it,” no Russian rocket in the whole Communist empire can so much as lift without being instantly detected. “It” is Midas and we shall soon be hearing a great deal about it.

Spy satellites are not new. We have had Tiros tumbling around space photographing cloud formations. Discoverer 17, another recently launched American satel-

lite, can be equipped with television cameras to picture the Soviet Union in great detail. What is new about Midas is that it photographs heat. The difference between conventional and heat—or infra-red —cameras is fantastic. It is the difference between a man taking a picture in a pea-soup fog and taking the same view on a fine day. Aircraft Doomed It is an apt comparison for, even where the entire land mass from the East German border to the coast of China to be hidden—to ordinary eyes—beneath an impenetrable layer of fog, the probing eye of Midas would show up streets, factories—end rising rockets—almost as if it were daylight. The secret is in the words “infra-red.” ' Discovered 160 years ago by a British astronomer, Sir William Herschel, the properties of infra-red rays are today made use of by police, industry, astronomers and other scientists and, of course, the armed forces.

It is the ability to pick up infra-red radiation that gives its deadliness to the R.A.F.’s Firestreak air-to-air missile. Let a hostile aircraft twist as it will, nothing can prevent Firestreak from “following its nose” home on to the target. With missiles such as Firestreak, a heat detector in the