This is the Radar Satellite Dish two blocks from where I used to live in Wall Township/Shark River, 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 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. The Project Diana site is now part of the Information Age Science History Museum and Learning Center at the former Camp Evans site, which is now being converted in to studios by Netflix. As my Italian grandfather liked to say, 'T'ings a change, Guiseppe'...
The Evans Area has InfoAge, and a State fire museum just opened up. Brookdale College has a building there. There are some ball fields and a bunch of other random shit. Still pretty cool to see...
ReplyDeleteThe Netflix crap is going on the old Fort Monmouth property off Route 35 in Eatontown/Oceanport/West Long Branch. If it ever gets completed.