Traveling at seven thousand feet per second, it was thirty-eight miles up when the rocket’s first stage fell away in a burst of flame. The second stage ignited, blasting the payload even higher, and then seven minutes into the flight it detached. For decades the missile had been tipped with a 9.6-megaton nuclear warhead aimed at the Soviet Union. Now it carried a different payload. The Titan II had just lofted into space a satellite called NOAA-16. The satellite fired its own rocket and was soon orbiting more than five hundred miles above the earth. Its orbit was polar, which meant that NOAA-16 passed almost directly over the North and South Poles on a fixed trajectory while the earth rotated beneath it. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, took command of the satellite. On board, an elliptical mirror the size of a dinner plate starting spinning, looking at a swath of the earth fifteen hundred miles wide and reflecting thermal infrared radiation into a collimating telescope called the AVHRR—Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer.
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