Barnes Earth Sensor

George and Rory,

What a great job of sleuthing you did in Washington!

Yes indeed, that is an Earth sensor that Barnes Engineering designed and built for Lockheed and the Air force. It’s mission was so classified that we invented an elaborate cover story about what we were building and they were put together and shipped with great secrecy.

Now everything has been de-classified. Four of those sensors flew on each of America’s low Earth altitude photo reconnaissance satellites. Each “bird” carried two redundant pairs, in case one died during the mission .... but not one ever did .... we were very proud of our reliability record.) Their purpose was to allow the enormous spy satellites to fly straight and level so that its cameras could take high definition pictures of Russian military and space activities.

Thank you for finding this.

In the Summer, I will get out the actual Earth sensor that flew on one of the the very early manned missions .... Project Mercury. I have it in Maine. It was recovered, along with the astronaut who flew the mission, so we could evaluate how it performed.