Been searching for this on Google with little success: what did Sputnik have those 4 long thin legs for?
They’re antennas, but I don’t know why they’re configured that way. They could be a phased array to produce directional transmissions, but I don’t know if Soviet electronics were up to the dual tasks of producing a phased array, and determining the spacecraft’s orientation to know which direction to beam.
It was actually two dipole antennas, transmitting on two frequencies. Basically they didn’t know how to control orientation and thus configured the antennas to have an omnidirectional transmission pattern.
Thanks! SDMB to the rescue