This is the Radar Satellite Dish two blocks from my last house in Wall Twsp., NJ. This dish and it's accompanying labs and offices is known as the 'Diana Site'. It is located on Marconi Road in the Camp Evans area in Wall Twsp., a decommissioned military base that was once a part of Fort Monmouth. It was on this site that the US Army’s Project Diana team on January 10, 1946, first received radio signals bounced from the moon.
The former US Army tracking dish was used as a ground station for the TIROS I and II weather satellites. TIROS I, and a series of successor test satellites, provided the technical experience to start separate civilian and military space-based weather observation programs. By the mid 1960s, the civilian TIROS program launched a series of satellites to provide routine, daily weather observations. and for Project Vanguard, which led to the launch of Vanguard 1, the second US satellite, in 1958. It was also an integral art of the worldwide system of radar and navigation controls for both the Mercury and Apollo space mission for NASA.
Project Diana, named for the Roman moon goddess Diana, was an experimental project of the US Army Signal Corps in 1946 to bounce radar signals off the Moon and receive the reflected signals. This was the first experiment in radar astronomy and the first active attempt to probe another celestial body. It was the inspiration for later EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) communication techniques.
The dish was demilitarized in the 1970s.
I was stationed at Monmouth twice and if I had known of this I would have went and taken a look. I hated that place so bad I volunteered for Vietnam and never looked back. Got in country around April of 67. Much better place for my young carcass!
ReplyDeleteTo this day ham radio operators bounce signals off the moon to communicate with one and other. It is still called 'EME' or earth moon earth.
ReplyDeleteOne would have to assume that Marconi Road was named after Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi an Italian physicist who was the creator of the wireless telegraph later becoming radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi
ReplyDeleteI lived in Oakhurst as a kid and sort of remember Ft. Monmouth, been to Allaire Village quite a few times, it was a class trip hot spot.
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