TIROS One: Earth's First Eye in Space
Near Trenton, Pennsylvania
The world's first weather satellite was built right here. In nineteen sixty, engineers at Lavelle Aircraft Corporation built TIROS One for RCA, which designed the satellite, the Television and Infrared Observation Satellite, using techniques borrowed from early television broadcasting.
Launched on April first, nineteen sixty, TIROS One sent back the first television images ever captured from orbit, revealing cloud patterns across entire ocean basins in a single frame. Forecasters had never seen anything like it. The satellite operated for seventy-eight days and transmitted roughly twenty-three thousand cloud photos. Its success proved the concept and led directly to the operational weather satellite network that today underpins every weather forecast on the planet. The next time a hurricane track saves lives, that lineage traces back to this building in suburban Pennsylvania.
