67 years have passed since Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite

Oct. 4 () –

This October 4 marks the 67th anniversary of launched by the Soviet Union in 1957 of Sputnik 1, the first unsuccessful attempt to put an artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth.

Sputnik 1, which means “travel companion” in Russian (“satellite” in astronautics), put the Russians at a clear advantage in the space race with the United Stateswhere the news caused a real commotion in the context of ‘Cold War’.

The satellite was an aluminum sphere 58 centimeters in diameter that carried four long, thin antennas. It had an approximate mass of 83 kilos, had two radio transmitters and orbited the Earth at a distance of between 938 kilometers at its apogee and 214 kilometers at its perigee. The spacecraft obtained information pertaining to the density of the upper layers of the atmosphere and the propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere.

The transmitters operated for three weeks, until the onboard chemical batteries failed, and were monitored with great interest throughout the world. Wikipedia reports.

The orbit of the then inactive satellite was later observed optically, until it fell 92 days after its launch (January 3, 1961), after having completed around 1,400 Earth orbits, accumulating a travel distance of approximately 70 million kilometers.