GEOS-2 International Optical Beacon Data Input V001 (GEOS2OBSINPUTINTL) at GES DISC

GEOS2OBSINPUTINTL is the optical beacon system data product which contains reduced raw geodetic optical observations obtained by various international camera systems. These data were used as input to the Quality Control Program to create the product called the International Optical Beacon Pass Summary Data. The optical beacon system, used for geometric geodesy studies, consisted of four xenon flash tubes programmed to flash sequentially, in a series of five or seven flashes. The instrument was flown on the second Geodetic Earth Orbiting Satellite (GEOS-2), also known as Explorer 36. Data are available for the time period from 1968-02-20 to 1968-10-03 in a single file with 1689 data records where each is a line of ASCII text.\n\nThe principal investigator for the Optical Beacon System experiment was R. E. Williston from APL. A previous version of this instrument flew on the first GEOS-1 satellite.