Science: The Good ERTS

For the past three months, a strange moth-shaped satellite has been orbiting the earth in a nearly perfect polar orbit some 560 miles high. Sweeping down from the Arctic to Antarctica and back again every 103 minutes, the 1,965-lb. spacecraft has been taking as many as 752 pictures of the earth every day; each shot covers a 115-by-115-mile square. Unlike U.S. and Soviet spy satellites, which are on the lookout for military sites, the mission of NASA's first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1) is purely scientific. A direct spin-off of the space agency's...

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