The Wright Stuff/Sputnik

Peter Stickney wrote:
In article ,
"JasiekS" writes:

Uzytkownik "Peter Stickney" napisal w wiadomosci
...
[snip...]

Yes. Luna, in 1947. (Naval Observatory-Pearl Harbor.
Luna was also the first U.S. Elint Satellite, used in the mid 1950s
to map the Soviet's network of Tall King search radars.
(Nobody said that the satellite had to be _artificial_, did they?)

Sorry for one ignorant question. Do you mean Luna=the Moon, Earth's natural
satellite?

Yes, I do. The first signals bounced from the Moon and received on
Earth were in 1946, by an U.S. Army Signal Corps Lieutenant waiting to
be mustered out. He used a UHF Air Search Radar with a 3 KW
....snip...

Sounds like John DeWitt and Project Diana. I seem to recall that the
word "deliberate" should go in there somewhere, as some early-warning
coastal radars in the right weather conditions may have picked up the
rising Moon during World War 2 and caused great, if momentary, excitement.

The Navy thought enough of this possibility to have begun construction of
a 600-foot (diameter) fully steerable radio dish at Sugar Grove,
West Virginia (just up the road from the later site of the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory) in the 1950s. Technical issues delayed construction
of what would still have been by nearly a factor of 2 the world's largest
steerable dish. These included the discovery that the concrete track
would not support the weight of the dish... After Sputnik, it
became quickly apparent that there were much better ways to do ELINT.
Moonbouce did remain in use for some intelligence-gathering ships,
perhaps as late as the Liberty.


Bill Keel