Monmouth Message
December 1, 1960

Page 1

Lab Speeds
Tiros Photos

New Techniques
Reduce Handling,
Transmission Time

     FORT MONMOUTH—Pictures taken by TIROS II and received here reach Washington in a mat-
ter of minutes, thanks to the high-speed photographic handling
and transmission techniques de-
veloped by the U. S. Army Signal Research and Development Lab-
oratory, the Department of the Army announced.
     Heart of the fast transmission is the laboratory's polaroid facsimile equipment, technically known as the AN-GXC-4, and nicknamed the 'Pola-fax,' which can speed a completed print from its transmitting station to any point reachable by wire or radio in a scant five minutes. SOLUTION
     This equipment is coupled with an equally fast unibath single solution developing and fixing that reads the TIROS H cloud-process for the 35-millimeter film cover pictures from a cathode ray tube, similar to a picture tube in a television receiver.
     Altogether, a completed print, or negative, of a cloud-cover picture taken by the television cam-eras in the satellite can be at the National Aeroenautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Center at Greenbelt, Md., 20 minutes after it is received from the 'bird.'
     The actual process works like this: the picture received is re-
corded on magnetic tape which is played into a slow-scan TV monitor, The tube is photographed by an automatic camera that advances a frame as each picture is completed. The 35-millimeter film from this camera is then developed, fixed and dried in less than 12 minutes.
RECORDED
     A projection from the film is recorded on a polaroid paper, cut to the correct size for the AN-GXC-4 and fed into the machine at Fort Monmouth for trans-mission to Greenbelt over a leased line. Five minutes later a completed photograph, either positive or negative, can be taken from the Pola-fax receiver in Greenbelt, ready for a courier to rush to NASA headquarters in downtown Washington.
     The remarkable facsimile ma-chine, developed for fast trans-mission of photographs, maps and overlays, in no way reduces the quality of the prints.

The work is a part of the over-all tracking program of the Astro Observation Center.

The Diana radar dish is a direct descendent of the historic Signals Corps antenna hat bounced man's first radar signal off the moon in 1946 from the same Fort Monmouth site.

Page updated August 16, 2004 page created August 16, 2004

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Monmouth Message December 1, 1960

Monmouth Message
December 1, 1960