The corona discharge problem, again

A corona discharge problem was described in Chapter 5 in connection with the development of the Vanguard prototype instrument much earlier at Iowa City. It reared its head again during the Deal I payload assembly in mid-December, when I discovered that the high-voltage power supplies had not been checked in a vacuum chamber.29 The JPL engineers stated that it was “no problem,” as the power supplies were “safe for direct shorting.” I knew from my testing at Iowa that electrical transients from arcing in a partial vacuum would destroy the supply. I had to prove my point by a series of overnight tests. They showed, first, that there was a problem, and second, that the encapsulation technique that I had worked out at Iowa solved the problem. After making that change, there were no further corona discharge incidents for the rest of the program, and the instruments operated in orbit without incident.

That episode was the most contentious one that I encountered during my stay at JPL. Without appropriate tests and an effective solution, there can be little doubt that our cosmic ray instruments would have failed soon after liftoff.