Word: sandia
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Soon after the January 17 collision between a nuke-carrying B-52 and its KC-135 tanker over Spain, a desperate Defense Department turned for help to the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, which conducts bomb-electronics research for the AEC. Sandia scientists promptly requested all available accident data from the task force. With other experts, they pored over interviews with surviving B-52 crew members and witnesses on the ground; they studied Air Force wind-velocity records and the ballistic characteristics and impact points of the three recovered H-bombs. By feeding complex equations into computers, they projected trajectories backward...
Simulated Breakup. Sandia's next step, reports its house organ, Lab News, was to work out what had happened to the lost bomb. Had it broken apart in the air, or come down intact? Had it fallen freely to the land below, or been carried far out to sea on its parachute? To simulate a mid-air breakup, the scientists dropped bomb parts from a high-flying plane at White Sands Missile Range, then photographed the craters made by the parts as they hit the ground. The pictures were rushed to Palomares, where searchers looked in vain for similar...
Back at their computers, other scientists of Sandia determined that the radioactive contamination of Spanish soil had been caused entirely by the two recovered bombs that had broken apart on impact. Had another bomb shattered on land, the level of radio activity would have been higher. Thus the scientists assumed that either the missing bomb had not broken apart on hitting land, or it had fallen into the sea. Further ballistics analysis and wind data enabled the Sandia computers eventually to plot the probable trajectory of the missing bomb and locate where it had hit the water. Their calculations tended...
...MATTHEWS Lieutenant Commander, U.S.N. Sandia Base...
...Sandia scientists twice lofted beacon lights up to 65,000 ft. and allowed them to drift down by parachute through the part of the atmosphere that was suspected of causing twinkling. Each descent was continuously observed with a 16-in. tracking telescope equipped to record the scintillations. The scientists concluded that 80% of the high-frequency scintillation occurs in a layer of atmosphere about 5,000 ft. deep, at altitudes of between...