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Posted by: Paolo Sep 20 2012, 05:22 AM

you may be excused for not knowing that today is the 60th anniversary of the official birth of the concept of the interplanetary probe.
Although Robert Goddard himself speculated on unmanned spacecraft sent to the other planets, it was on 20 September 1952 that Eric Burgess and C.A. Cross read their paper "the Martian Probe" at a meeting of the North-Western branch of the British Interplanetary Society. Extrapolating on the concept of the "minimum Earth satellite" pioneered by the society, they described how a package of instruments could be packaged in a realistic spacecraft, which orbit it could follow, how it would generate power etc. This contrasted with large manned expeditions as described for example in von Braun's Mars project. In doing so, they also created the word "probe" to mean an unmanned, interplanetary spacecraft. (I believe that the word was previously used, e.g. for weather and high altitude unmanned balloons, anyone can confirm this?)
The "Martian Probe" paper was later published in Aeronautics (Nov 1952) and in the Journal of the BIS (Vol 12, No 2, 1953).
C.A. Cross further elaborated on the idea in the lecture "the Use of Probe Rockets" that he gave to the BIS in London on 1 December 1956 (published in the Journal of the BIS, Vol 16, No 3, 1957).
Go get a copy of the two papers from a library near you because they are absolutely fascinating!