Word: reflectors
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...operation began when a Thor rocket took off from Cape Canaveral just before dawn carrying a canister containing a tightly folded deflated balloon of plastic film and aluminum foil. This was Echo A12, an experimental successor to Echo I, the 100-ft. radio-reflector that was launched on Aug. 12, 1960, and is still orbiting the earth. Echo A12 was not expected to orbit; its job was merely to expand in space and test a new kind of aluminized film that would stay rigid after the gas that blew up the balloon had escaped through meteor punctures...
Russia's most useful eavesdropping weapon is a tiny, kopeck-sized reflector. It was such a reflector, installed inside a plaque of the U.S. Great Seal in the Moscow embassy, that U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge displayed to the Security Council last year. When an infra-red beam is aimed at the reflector from outdoors, it acts as a microphone. Alternatively, but less reliably, the infra-red beam can be trained on any imperceptibly oscillating object, such as a metal lampshade or empty highball glass, that can act as a crude reflector for conversation...
...satellite packed with electronic equipment and acting as a relay station for forwarding floods of messages almost instantaneously around the curve of the earth. Echo I, the 100-ft. balloon satellite, which is still a striking naked-eye spectacle in the sky, showed the value of a large, passive reflector from which to bounce radio waves. Transit satellites I-B and II-A were U.S. Navy prototypes for a network that will outmode all previous methods of air and sea navigation. The U.S.'s Pioneer V lived up to its name by spinning into an orbit around the sun, still...
Solar Stove. A 14-lb. aluminum-coated steel disk that cooks by focusing the rays of the sun on its grill has been developed by Los Angeles' American Landscape Products, Inc. The 32-in. reflector gathers enough heat to grill a steak in twelve minutes, boil water in two minutes. Price...
...sphere may collapse, pushed to a pancake by air drag and pressure of sunlight, or drawn together by the Mylar's "memory" of the way it was folded in the launching rocket. But a flattish or crumpled shape may continue to serve for years as a good radio reflector, which is the basic job that Echo was sent up to perform...