DISCOVERIES
OF THE
OBSERVATORY

Sputnik:

Model of Sputnik 1 Oct. 4, 1957, EARTH ORBIT
It wasn't a very good conversationalist. Its only vocabulary consisted of "beep-beep-beep," but Sputnik 1 woke up the world like nothing else could have and launched the race for outer space.

On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union put the world's first artificial satellite into orbit. Sputnik 1 was an 84 kilogram (184 pound), 58 centimeter (23 inch) wide ball with four radio antennas streaming off to one side. That may not sound too impressive, but at the time the United States was still at the drawing board, planning to get a 1.4 kilogram (three pound) satellite into orbit.

Sputnik had two radio transmitters that sent out regular signals as it circled the globe. Even amateur radio operators could pick up the distinctive "beep-beep-beep" as it passed overhead.

There were no scientific experiments aboard Sputnik, and what information came from from the satellite was from observing its orbit and the speed at which it decayed.

The Soviets followed that triumph the next month by sending up a 500 kilogram (1,100 pound) satellite containing a dog.

America -- overconfident that it was the world's leader in technology -- went into a tizzy. The US didn't have anything in space! But as a result of the national debate, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was created by President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress enacted the National Defense Education Act of 1958 to beef up the educational system to make it competitive with the Russian system.

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Diameter: 58 cm (23 in) Weight: 83.6 kg (184 lb) Launch vehicle: A 1 Sputnik

The first photograph of Sputnik in orbit was taken by the Newbrook Observatory.

The Innisfree Meteorite:

Innisfree Meteorite The INNISFREE (Alberta) meteorite fell 13 km north of the town of this name at 7.17 pm on February 5th, 1977. An immediate search of the area by light plane and on foot, turned up nothing, but photographic records from two stations in the MORP network allowed a computer prediction of the most likely fall area. Dr. Ian Halliday of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics led an N.R.C. sponsored party to search the area some eleven days later. Within a few hours the first and largest piece (2.07 kg) had been found only a few hundred yards from the point predicted by the computer program. Subsequently 5 other fragments were found, bringing the total mass recovered to 3.79 kg. The meteorite turned out to be an LL5 hypersthene, olivine chondrite breccia and thus a member of a relatively rare group. It is a particularly important meteorite because its orbit in space has been calculated from the photographic data.

The Abee Meteorite:

The Abee meteorite fell at 11:05 p.m. Mountain Time on June 9th, 1952, about 80 kilometers north of Edmonton, Alberta. This 107 kg ( 237 lb. ) enstatite chondrite was recovered from a deep hole in a cultivated field a few days later.
Of the 46 meteorites recovered in Canada, only eleven were witnessed falls. One of the most significant of these events was certainly the fall of this meteorite, as it provided a considerable mass of a relatively rare class of meteorite, and has become the object of intense study.
There is continuous twilight during the June nights and a substantial number of observers were outside and were witness to the fireball. All observers were impressed by the brightness of the fireball, most described it as brighter than the full moon. There were broken clouds in the area and some saw the fireball through light clouds.
On Saturday June 14, a farmer working in his freshly plowed field, spotted a deep hole and reported it to a local school teacher. The meteorite was removed and taken to the town of Newbrook where it was weighed at the local hardware store and prominently displayed for a few weeks. Later it was purchased by the Geological Survey of Canada for the Canadian National Meteorite Collection in Ottawa.

Determining the Orbit

To determine the orbit followed by a meteorite before its collision with the Earth, the date, time and location, as well as velocities and direction are required. From this information an estimate of the orbit can be confidently obtained. However visual observations are subject to interpretation and have an error of 20% normally. The string of meteor camera stations located in the prairie provinces was built to provide acceptable orbit caculations for meteoric fireballs, and their data was used to determine the orbit of the Abee meteor.

The Bruderheim Meteorite:

Bruderheim Meteorite The largest recovered fall in Canada, Bruderheim was located and collected after a spectacular fireball was seen over a wide area on the 4 th march, 1960. It has been widely studied by modern techniques of isotopic, trace element and electron microprobe analysis. It is a L6 chondrite.
The brilliant fireball that was observed for the Bruderheim fall ended with a detonation that was heard over about a 100 km radius. Pieces were quickly located lying on the surface of the snow, ranging in size from a few milligrams to 31 kg. In total, nearly 700 fragments with a total mass of more than 303 kg were recovered from an area which was centred about 10 km north of the town of Bruderheim. The largest individual is in the National Meteorite Collection, Ottawa, although the bulk of the material is held at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Close-up of the Bruderheim Meteorite showing granular structure The stones making up the Bruderheim fall vary enormously in size from 31 kg downwards. It will be noted that virtually all the fragments show the typical black fusion crust, indicating that fragmentation took place during the passage through the atmosphere while the meteor was still traveling fast enough to cause frictional surface fusion. These photographs show the largest piece with a close-up of the granular interior. It is thought that this piece broke-up when it hit a tree. The largest piece of such a shower tends to travel furthest and thus end up towards the end of the ellipse of fall furthest from the radiant of the fireball.