Word: radar
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Last Friday morning, Colonel John R. Fellows watched from his Honolulu hotel room as what appeared to be a giant golf ball pulled into Pearl Harbor. The white dome, encasing the powerful military radar of which Fellows is in charge, was returning from a week at sea. "It just came in while I was sitting here," said Fellows, who works for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA). The Sea-Based X-Band radar was, you could say, right on time...
...Designed to keep an eye out for rogue missiles flying toward the United States, the SBX had been scheduled to report for duty in Alaska in early 2006, but a series of structural repairs and upgrades have kept it in warmer waters. For over a year, the nine-story radar that sits atop a self-propelled Norwegian oil platform has been coming and going from Pearl Harbor for fixes and tests - a delay critics see as symptomatic of an agency under pressure to deliver a national missile defense system that is still more fiction than fact...
...program has already touched many parts of the globe: The radar's prototype was built in the Marshall Islands; its semi-submersible converted oil rig platform was designed in Norway. The two parts were assembled in Texas, its 50,000 tons hoisted onto a ship, and sailed 15,000 miles around the tip of South America (it was too big to use the Panama Canal), arriving in Pearl Harbor in January 2006. Its ultimate destination is the more challenging waters of Adak, a farflung outpost in Alaska's Aleutian island chain, famous for terrible weather and 100-foot waves...
...Whether or not such an exquisite piece of intelligence equipment should be on the open ocean is another question. The upside is mobility; the downside is salt water, wind and waves. Shortly after arriving in Hawaii, the MDA ordered an assessment of the radar's rig, which resulted in a $27-million to-do list before it could be declared operational. Improvements include everything from rethinking the platform's ballast system to installing anti-slip surfaces on its decks. In short, at the time when it was originally supposed to be in service, the vessel...
...field of HPV vaccine research is still in its earliest stages. Studies have only just begun on the safety of the vaccine in women older than 26. And, according to GlaxoSmithKline spokeswoman Liad Diamond, studying Cervarix in boys and men is "on the radar screen of the clinical development team" but there is "nothing underway right now." At Merck, clinical trials of Gardasil in males have been ongoing for about a year, and preliminary results show that "immune responses in 9- to 15-year-old boys are consistent with those found in females aged 16 to 23," according to Merck...