Midlife: 1958-1962
When the US satellites Explorer and Vanguard were launched a few months later, Minitrack was able to track them easily. This worked sufficiently well that the Minitrack interferometers also formed the basic tracking method of the succeeding STADAN network.
The last prime IGY Minitrack station went operational at Woomera during October 1957. Outside of some minor shuffling and addition of sites and the rebuilding of temporary installations, no major changes were made to Minitrack until the big 26-m paraboloidal antenna was installed at the new Fairbanks site in May 1962. During this period, the Minitrack network easily tracked the few, relatively simple scientific satellites that passed overhead. It was a time of intense planning, research, and development as the Nation planned space programs that would soon saturate Minitrack's capabilities.
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