Celebrating SAS Member Anna Hillier's Role in Project Moonwatch

Forrest M. Mims III

Fifty years ago the Soviet Union stunned the United States and the rest of the world by launching the first satellite. Its name was Sputnik, and its scratchy, beeping signals were broadcast to every radio and television in the land on October 4, 1957.

I had just turned 14 and will never forget rising at 4:30 AM to go to our front yard in Houston and watch Sputnik's launch vehicle glide by far overhead.

The satellite itself was 23-inches in diameter, about the size of a beach ball and too small to be seen with the unaided eye. But the much larger booster rocket was also in orbit, and it reflected enough sunlight to be easily seen. It looked like a star moving rapidly across the sky.

Because the rocket was tumbling through space, the sunlight it reflected flickered as it passed overhead.

Figure 1. Model of the 2-feet diameter Sputnik I, the world's first artificial space satellite. Photograph courtesy of NASA.

Even before Sputnik, amateur astronomers were well aware that they would be able to track the first satellites, no matter which side was first.

Dr. Fred Whipple, a prominent Harvard astronomer who was then director of the Smithsonian Institution's Astrophysical Observatory, was familiar with the superb telescopes being built by amateur astronomers. More than a year before the launch of Sputnik, Whipple organized Project Moonwatch, a program in which amateur astronomers would track the first satellites.

US government plans to track satellites to determine their orbits were based on the assumption the US Vanguard program would carry the first satellites into orbit. When Sputnik was launched, the US tracking network was not ready, but Project Moonwatch and its hundreds of amateurs were ready to track Sputnik. One of those Moonwatch volunteers was Anna Hillier.

On October 12, a Moonwatch team was scanning the sky from a rooftop at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for their first glimpse of Sputnik. The team members peered through specially designed, inexpensive telescopes that looked down on a small, flat mirror pointed toward the sky above.

Anna Hillier was the first to spot the moving point of light through her telescope. She dutifully wrote down the time, but she was too excited to activate a special buzzer announcing her find. Soon buzzers were going off across the rooftop as more members spotted Sputnik. But Anna was first, and she saw the actual satellite. The others saw the rocket booster trailing behind, much as I did in Houston.

Thanks to Anna's notation, she was credited with being first in New England to spot the satellite. Anna has provided details about her experience and the famous Moonwatch telescopes in this edition of The Citizen Scientist. I hope you will read her accounts. You can out more about Anna's achievement by reading her letter in the October 2007 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine. In a letter following Anna's, Paul Valleli verifies what happened on the Harvard rooftop.

A month after Sputnik the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2, a larger satellite that carried a live dog named Laika into orbit. Moonwatch teams stayed busy tracking the new satellite. But the Vanguard satellite they had hoped to track exploded just after launch on December 6, 1957.

The US was caught totally off guard by the success of Sputnik and the failure of Vanguard. The US won the space race that eventually followed. But the science education reforms that followed Sputnik still need help.

A shortened version of this editorial was first published in "The Country Scientist" column in the San Antonio Express-News on 01 October 2007.

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