By international agreement under the International Astronomical Union, the satellites and space probes were initially named with Greek letters, following the system for naming stars in constellations. The year of launch was included in the launch names, so Sputnik I was 1957 Alpha. The payload was called Alpha I, when known – in the case of Sputnik I, it wasn't clear initially which was the payload, so the payload became Alpha II. Other pieces were also numbered, so the carrier rocket was usually Alpha II. The 24 Greek letters were soon used, so the next sequence started Alpha Alpha and so forth. By 1962 Beta Psi had been launched and it was clear that the Greek alphabet system would no longer work. Thereafter, launches were numbered, starting with 1963-1 with the payload normally being 1963-1A, etc... As soon as a new satellite or space probe was launched, Space Track alerted the primary sensors and processed observations as they came in, issuing a preliminary tracking bulletin promptly and updating it after about 24 hours when additional observations from around the world had been obtained. Routine bulletins continued to be issued regularly as needed to keep up with the changing orbits, some of which decayed fairly rapidly in the atmosphere. There was another flurry of activity when the last revolutions occurred, as it was difficult to forecast the exact reentry path. The NSSCC had a room dedicated as a filter center for monitoring communications and obtaining observations. The filter center had displays listing the orbiting and decayed satellites and a projector system that could show the motion of one satellite over the earth. The displays were devised by A/3C Peter P. Kamrowski. The center was staffed by a Duty Controller and assistants. The center was designed by Senior Controller 1st Lt Cotter, based on his earlier experience as a volunteer member of the USAF Ground Observer Corps (the Ground Observer Corps filter centers were in turn based on the United Kingdom aircraft tracking centers developed during World War II to track Nazi aircraft). By 1960, the position of Duty Analyst was established. Once observations had been reduced, the duty analyst reviewed them and decided which orbits needed to be recomputed to bring them up to date. In the case of new launches or decaying satellites, one analyst was dedicated to processing observations for that satellite. At this period, the
6594th Aerospace Test Wing was trying to achieve a successful launch in the Discoverer satellite program. The satellites, launched from Vandenberg AFB, were all in polar orbits. They were controlled by the 6594th at Palo Alto (later the
Air Force Satellite Control Facility at Sunnyvale CA). Lt Cotter was the liaison officer between Space Track and the 6594th. The first 12 launch attempts were failures; the first success was
Discoverer 1 (1959 Beta). Lockheed Corporation, the development contractor, won their bonus payment because the telemetry showed the satellite achieved orbit, but it was never seen again, despite massive Space Track and other efforts to find it. By this time Space Track had contacts with many sensors around the world. One of them was at the
South Pole, associated with the
International Geophysical Year. One of their ninety observations of
Discoverer 2 (1959 Gamma) was sent from
Byrd Station saying that the satellite had passed to the left of the zenith at 2.25 degrees, implying an orbital inclination of 89.9 degrees. This report is probably the only direct observation of the inclination of a satellite's orbit that has ever been made. Because the Discoverer satellites carried payloads that were deorbited and recovered from parachutes by aircraft of the 6594th Aerospace Test Wing based in Hawaii, the timing of deorbit was critical. (The deorbit attempt of Discoverer 2's payload went seriously wrong: the payload landed on
Spitsbergen, instead of coming down over the Pacific ocean. It was recovered by Russian miners, likely very helpful to Russian intelligence and the Russian space program in general). Later, to improve the accuracy of the deorbit commands, orbital analysts Lt Algimantas Šimoliūnas, Lawrence Cuthbert, or Ed Casey would update the Space Track ephemeris for each Discoverer at the last minute and send the update to the 6594th. The 6594th had a global network of tracking stations (including Alaska, Hawaii, Seychelles, Guam, and the UK), used for command and on-orbit control of the satellites. However, the tracking data was derived from telemetry monitoring and was not as precise as the Space Track data, which was based in major part on radar and optical tracking. Lockheed decided to put a small light on Discoverer XI (1960 Delta). Space Track acted as liaison between the 6594th and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, to use their Baker-Nunn camera at Cadiz, Spain, to photograph the light. This would give Lockheed valuable information about the accuracy of their orbit computations. The experiment worked very well and was not repeated. Orbital Analysts at 1st Aero were also heavily involved in the achievement. Observations from the SPASUR fence were very helpful in tracking the fragments (SPASUR had initially refused to send Space Track individual observations, sending instead only orbital parameters, but this policy had fortunately been changed by 1961). The technique used to identify multiple objects orbiting in the same orbital plane was refined by Lawrence Cuthbert and published as an automated program by the Wolf Corporation [Later, Larry worked with Bob Morris, Chief Orbital Analyst at Colorado Springs, to develop a program to derive orbital elements for all unknown radar tracks; the methodology worked and it became known as the Cuthbert-Morris Algorithm. The resulting program was called "Breakup, Lost and Decay" and, along with subsequent improvements, it has found thousands of the objects in the Space Satellite Catalog. It is still the Air Force Astrodynamic Standard for Uncorrelated Target (UCT) processing. ==Communications==