{"id":386,"date":"2009-12-21T11:19:34","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T11:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress65\/?p=386"},"modified":"2009-12-21T11:19:34","modified_gmt":"2009-12-21T11:19:34","slug":"three-solstice-launches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/three-solstice-launches\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Solstice Launches"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Jethro Tull sang, “Ring, solstice bells!” Happy midwinter, everyone.<\/p>\n

Forty-five years ago today — December 21, 1964 — Explorer-26<\/a> launched on a Delta rocket out of Cape Canaveral, to study the Van Allen radiation belt. Also known as EPE-D, or the Energetic Particle Explorer, it measured trapped particles in the geomagnetic field.<\/p>\n

Twenty years later, in 1984, the Soviet Union launched the second of its probes to Venus and Halley’s Comet. Vega-2<\/a>, or Venera-Halley-2, launched atop a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. They’d launched Vega-1 back on the 15th, as I noted in this blog entry<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And ten years ago, in 1999, ACRIMSAT<\/a> — the Active Cavity Radiometer Irradiance Monitor satellite — launched from Vandenberg AFB on a Taurus rocket.* ACRIMSAT was launched as a secondary payload with the Korean KOMPSAT, and was designed to study variations in solar radiation. <\/p>\n

\n___
\n*Note that this launch took place late at night on December 20th on the West Coast; it was already December 21st on the East Coast, so different references list the launch date as one or the other. I think it made a nice trifecta to list it with these others.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>by <\/span>\"feather\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Jethro Tull sang, “Ring, solstice bells!” Happy midwinter, everyone. Forty-five years ago today — December 21, 1964 — Explorer-26 launched on a Delta rocket out of Cape Canaveral, to study the Van Allen radiation belt. Also known as EPE-D, or the Energetic Particle Explorer, it measured trapped particles in \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[26,37,11,17],"class_list":["post-386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space","tag-launch","tag-nasa","tag-space-history","tag-vandenberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grayrinehart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}