Word: radars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Fidel Castro's Communist dictatorship fairly bristles with coastal emplacements, sea-scanning radar, patrolling helicopters and 45-m.p.h. komar-class Soviet torpedo boats. Yet whenever the mosquito navy of the anti-Castro exiles buzzes up to bite away at fortress Cuba, as it did in Havana harbor last week, the recruits behind Castro's hardware curiously seem to be looking the other...
Anthony Barringer, a Canadian geophysicist, is unbothered by Soviet se crecy. At a symposium on remote sensing in Huntsville, Ala., last week, he theorized that Luna 7's radar may have failed to "see" a top porous layer of the moon's crust. As a result, the space ship crashed on its way to a landing on the hard lunar rock below...
...difference between success and failure, Barringer decided, could have been caused by an altimeter error of as little as 30 ft. - which some scientists believe is the approximate depth of a layer of porous rock or partially compacted dust that covers the moon. Barringer's conclusion: Russian radar penetrated the moon's top layer, reflected back from the bedrock below and reported an incorrect altitude...
Sophisticated Conjecture. Such lunar theorizing is based largely on earthly experience. Barringer has already designed effective radar systems to measure the thickness of antarctic ice, which is largely transparent to many low-frequency radars and radio altimeters, a phenomenon that results in incorrect altitude readings and has caused several plane crashes. Barringer is also conducting laboratory experiments for NASA to study the possibility of designing a radar system that would measure the thickness of the moon's surface layer from an orbiting vehicle. He has bounced radar pulses off simulated lunar crusts made of porous lava and compressed lava...
Scientists at both NASA and Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is building Surveyor, the first U.S. lunar soft-landing vehicle, remain skeptical of Barringer's theory. They say it is still largely conjecture. But it is conjecture that has made the problems of radar transparency a vital concern in the design of a sophisticated Surveyor altimeter that should have no trouble distinguishing the true surface of the moon...