Word: radar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, 81, a British government scientist who developed the first practical radar system; after a long illness; in Inverness, Scotland. A member of the same family to which the inventor of the steam engine, James Watt, belonged, Watson-Watt worked on what was then called "radio location," a process of bouncing radio waves off distant objects. Tested by tracking the plane that carried Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Munich and back in 1938, Watson-Watt's aircraft-spotting radar later helped his country repel German attacks during the Battle of Britain...
...thorough examination. They are taking full advantage of the opportunity. In addition to the conventional telescopes of every size and variety that will be following the comet, NASA'S big radio telescope in the Mojave Desert will be aimed at Kohoutek in an attempt to bounce radar signals off the comet's nucleus (those echoes may tell scientists more about the size and character of the nucleus). M.I.T.'s Haystack Radio Observatory will try a similar experiment in reverse: it will study radio waves from a far-off radio source (possibly a quasar) after they pass through...
...exploration of the solar system. Scientists are still sifting through the mass of lunar measurements, pictures and rocks brought back to earth by the Apollo astronauts. From the data gathered by Russia's Venera 7 and 8 landers, America's Mariner 2 and 5 flybys, and radar observations by the Mojave telescope, astronomers can now describe in some detail the hellish surface temperature (900°F.), cratered topography and atmospheric conditions of cloud-shrouded Venus. Using the startlingly good pictures transmitted by Mariner 9, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena have just completed a huge model...
...over North Vietnam, radar operators scanned their screens carefully. American bombing had stopped two months earlier, just before the U.S. presidential election, but eight years of air war had taught the North Vietnamese never to relax their vigilance. Furthermore, the Paris negotiations had broken down a few days previous and messages from Washington had grown increasingly menacing...
Suddenly the radar operators leaned forward in amazement. Flocks of giant blips appeared on their screens--blips that could only signify B-52's, the biggest and most awesome weapon in the United States's arsenal. The operators began to calculate coordinates and plot trajectories, and their fears mounted as they did so: the bombers were not heading for the mountainous trails of Laos this time, or for the panhandle villages, or for army camps in the countryside. The operators alerted the air defense crews with special urgency. The B-52's were all heading for Hanoi--the first installment...