Camp Evans Historic District

New Jersey

In January 1946, engineers at this New Jersey site bounced a radar signal off the moon and caught the echo.

historicalengineeringmilitary

On the morning of January tenth, 1946, as the moon rose over the Jersey shore, a crew here fired VHF radar pulses straight up through the ionosphere. The pulses hit the moon. The echo came back, picked up by a modified wartime SCR-271 radar set. They called it Project Diana. One of the engineers, Walter McAfee, worked out the speed of the moon from the results. It took forty minutes for the moon to cross fifteen degrees, the width of the fixed radar beam as the Earth turned beneath it. The site had already spent the war doing this kind of work. Radar built here was adapted to detect Japanese kamikaze aircraft, and a special unit took apart captured German and Japanese radar sets to see how they worked. Eleven years after the moon shot, replacement equipment mounted on the frame of a captured German radar at the same spot helped track Sputnik.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
during moonrise on January 10, 1946, Project Diana transmitted VHF radar pulses through the ionosphere to the moon and detected the reflection using a modified version of an experimental SCR-271

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

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