Mc IDAS - History - ATS

ATS

In 1953 Verner Suomi measured the heat budget of a corn field for his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago. For the rest of his professional career he worked in the field of remote measuring using radiometers, often working with Robert Parent. They developed a remote sensing radiometer with the intent of flying it into space and measuring the heat budget of the Earth. Their first attempt was fitted to Vanguard TV3, but this exploded on launch. A similar experiment flew on Explorer 7 in 1959. This experiment demonstrated the impact of cloud cover on the heat balance of the Earth.

To further develop the field of satellite-based meteorology, NASA and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants led to the creation of the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. At the SSEC, Suomi and Parent developed the Spin Scan Cloudcover Camera (SSCC) to accurately measure and map cloud cover. The SSCC imaged a single strip of the Earth at a time, feeding out its information directly to a radio for broadcast to the ground. Fixed to the body of a rotating satellite, the SSCC would build up a 2D image as the satellite spun and rotated in its orbit.

SSCC was launched on ATS-1 on 6 December 1966. On 5 November 1967 ATS-3 launched the Multicolor Spin Scan Cloudcover Camera, which provided the first color meteorological imaging. Data from these instruments was captured on realtime printouts, and required manual work to cut and paste the successive strips into a single image, and then into multiple time-lapse images. Although a number of advances were made while examining this data, the work was tedious and time consuming.

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