Word: argus
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When the rocket-launched atom bombs of Project Argus were exploded last year 300 miles above the South Atlantic (TIME, March 30), most of the ionized particles the explosions created were picked up by the earth's magnetic field and lofted in arching curves around the earth in a man-made imitation of the Van Allen radiation belts. This effect was expected and was duly observed by U.S. scientists. But a team of the Army's Fort Monmouth men, led by Dr. Hans A. Bomke, was quietly watching for subtler effects. To pick up the faint traces they...
...charged nuclei and negative electrons. Theory suggested that at a certain altitude above the earth this charged plasma should have a sort of elasticity that would permit hydromagnetic waves to pass along it, rather like mechanical waves traveling along a coil spring. The Fort Monmouth scientists found that the Argus explosions started just such waves in a layer of plasma about 1,500 miles high. The waves were about 1,000 miles long, and they traveled at several thousand miles per second, spreading around the earth from the South Atlantic like ripples around a spherical pond...
...scientists followed the waves halfway round the earth and then lost track of them. But since the Argus tests, the Fort Monmouth team has noticed other waves that travel in the same high duct of plasma, apparently started by electrified particles slamming in from the sun. The Signal Corps is continuing to study its newfound duct. But when its scientists are asked whether they hope to find practical uses in communication, their military chaperons stop the conversation...
...back-scatters it could handle. With experience. Thaler found he could distinguish and identify the special characteristics of everything from summer lightning to Polaris missiles, thermonuclear detonations and the aurora borealis. Last summer, in the line of his regular duty, Thaler directed the Navy's Argus Project, in which atom bombs were exploded 300 miles above the South Atlantic (TIME, March 30). In Washington, some 7,000 miles away, a Project Tepee set picked up the shots. The same set had also successfully registered the Teak and Kettle high-altitude thermonuclear explosions over Johnston Island in the Pacific...
...days later, the House Space Committee released testimony on the even wider possibilities suggested by Project Argus-the series of bombs exploded late last summer 300 miles above the South Atlantic that sent a shell of charged particles racing round the world. A nuclear bomb exploded over the Indian Ocean, Pentagon officials told the committee, could theoretically disrupt radio communications in Moscow, some 7,000 miles away. Similarly, a blast set off high over the tip of South America could interfere with communications in the Washington area. But to make such interference effective, bombs much larger than Project Argus...