Word: meteorics
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...When a meteor-even if it is no bigger than a grain of sand-hits the earth's atmosphere, it leaves a long trail of ionized particles 60 miles up. Radio communications men have known for years that these trails act as wave reflectors, and they have tried to use them to make certain very short waves, which normally stop at the horizon, carry messages far around the curve of the earth. Chief difficulty was that most of the ionized trails last only a second or so. Before one of them could be located and used as a reflector...
Last week the Canadian government declassified a system which puts the meteor trails to work. Called "Janet" and developed by a group led by Dr. P. A. Forsyth, the system comprises two ground stations as much as 1,000 miles apart which constitute a "circuit." Their beam antennae look toward each other. When a meteor hits in the right place between them and leaves its reflecting trail, a signal from the receiving station reaches the transmitting station and tells it to send its message...
...bomb was really exploded 22 miles above the earth, it should yield valuable information in another way too. One of the toughest problems for the designers of long-range ballistic missiles is "re-entry": i.e., how to get the missile's warhead down through the lower atmosphere at meteor speed without having it burn up like a meteor. If the July 3 test showed that a nuclear warhead achieves "good" effects on ground targets, even when exploded 20 miles above the surface, most of the re-entry problem will have been eliminated...
Professor Fred L. Whipple, chairman of the Department and Director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, is the leading figure in the meteor project. It has centered in the New Mexico desert, where meteor showers have been photographed from twin stations for many years...
...work. The Observatory has given up its part in the operation of the High Altitude Observatory at Climax, Colorado, but still shares the newer Sunspot, New Mexico, site of the Air Force's Sacramento Peak Observatory. The instruments include the largest coronagraph in the world, and four super-Schmidt meteor cameras there and at the companion meteor station at Mayhill, New Mexico...