project diana

Namesake of the Roman lunar goddess (twin sister of Apollo, establishing the naming convention for missions eventually taken up by civilian agencies) carried out by the US Army Signal Corps at a specially built laboratory with a power surplus transmitter array at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey achieved on this day in 1946 one of its initial aims, concomitantly establishing the discipline of radio astronomy, by demonstrating that a radar wave could be bounced off the surface of the satellite, sent and received by a terrestrial source. Previously no one knew for certain whether transmissions through the vacuum of space were possible. This monumentally large step not only accurately furnished the distance from the Earth to the Moon and hinted at mapping the terrain of other worlds, Project Diana in a sense began the Space Age.