TIROS 1

Taking off on April 1st 1960 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, TIROS-1 was the first weather satellite launched by NASA, along with several other partners like the U.S. Army Research and Development Laboratory, the U.S. Naval Photographic Interpretation Center, the Radio Corporation of America and the U.S. Weather Bureau. Everyone was excited to see if it would work.

What was TIROS-1’s job?

The TIROS Program was created to determine if satellites could be useful in Earth Science, and even though it operated for only 75 days the experiment met massive success and was a true breakthrough in the way NASA studied the Earth. As well as being a prototype for dozens of other TIROS and other satellite missions to come, TIROS-1 proved that the best way to look at the earth was from the sky.