about PROJECT DIANA
Jack DeWitt had dreamed of bouncing radar waves off the moon since well before World War II. "It occurred to me," he wrote in his notebook, "that it might be possible to reflect ultrashort waves from the moon. If this could be done it would open up wide possibilities for the study of the upper atmosphere. So far as I know no one has ever sent waves off the earth and measured their return through the entire atmosphere of the earth." On the night of May 20, 1940, using a receiver and 80-watt transmitter designed for radio station WSM, he made an unsuccessful attempt to test the theory by reflecting 138-MHz (2-meter) radio waves off the moon. DeWitt attributed to the failure to insufficient receiver sensitivity; his conviction that radio waves could be bounced off the moon was unshaken.
Fast forward to August 10, 1945. DeWitt—now Lt. Col. Dewitt—was Director of the Evans Signal Laboratory in Belmar, New Jersey. The U.S. had just dropped the second of two atomic bombs on Japan, and military hostilities had ceased. DeWitt was scheduled to be demobilized within a few months, and his staff was already being disbanded.
So when his bosses in Washington, anticipating the development by the Soviet Union of long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, charged him with determining whether such missiles could be detected by radar even if they strayed into the atmosphere enroute to their target, Dewitt was ready for the challenge. He needed a distant target for the attempt, and he made what to him was the obvious choice—the moon. He code-named the experiment Project Diana after the Roman goddess of the moon—observing that according to ancient mythology, “she had never been cracked."
He quickly set about assembling his team. To serve as lead scientist, he chose King Stodola, Head of the Special Developments Section. Stodola was an expert in moving target detection who had developed techniques for spotting low-flying kamikaze flights; he had spent most of his World War II career working with, as he put it, the “Old Faithful” SCR-271. With his unique combination of technical expertise, creative problem-solving abilities, and social skills, Stodola proved an excellent choice. Harold Webb, Jack Mofenson, and Herbert Kauffman completed the team of radar engineers. Mathematician Walter McAfee of the Theoretical Studies Group was also indispensable to the Project, which could not have succeeded without his elegant calculations of the reflectivity coefficient of the moon. Members of the Antenna and Mechanical Design Group and other Laboratory components were also, as Stodola later put it, “scrounged into” the effort on a more occasional basis to meet specific needs along the way.
In the waning days of their wartime service, the men began to work feverishly towards their goal. Short on both time and budget, they assembled the major components needed to carry out the experiment by modifying equipment already on hand, including a crystal-controlled receiver/transmitter designed by the radio pioneer Edwin Howard Armstrong. (A detailed description appears elsewhere on this site.)
The results of their initial tests were discouraging. "The equipment was very haywire," DeWitt said later. But at 11:48am on January 10, 1946, they aimed their antenna at the horizon and were rewarded by an answering echo. Again and again they transmitted, again and again the response came back approximately 2.5 seconds later—the time required to complete a round trip to the moon—until 12:09pm, when the moon moved out of range. Harold Webb and Herbert Kauffman happened to be the ones on hand for this momentous event; DeWitt was in Belmar having lunch and buying cigarettes. The feat was repeated over the next three days and on eight additional occasions during the month.
The War Department sat on the news of the achievement for a full two weeks while they painstakingly verified the results. "We had trouble with General Van Deusen our head of R&D in Washington,” DeWitt explained years later. “When my C.O. Col. Victor Conrad told him about it over the telephone the General did not want the story released until it was confirmed by outsiders for fear it would embarrass the Sig[nal] C[orps]."
What followed, as DeWitt later related, was a real nail-biter. Two experts from the Radiation Laboratory, George E. Valley, Jr. and Donald G. Fink, had come to New Jersey along with Gen. Van Deusen to observe a reenactment of the experiment. The equipment had been set up exactly as before, and yet…nothing. "You can imagine that at this point I was dying,” said DeWitt. “Shortly a big truck passed by on the road next to the equipment and immediately the echoes popped up. I will always believe that one of the crystals was not oscillating until it was shaken up or there was a loose connection which fixed itself. Everyone cheered except the General who tried to look pleased."
Once the War Department was fully satisfied that the Project Diana team had indeed bounced radio waves off the moon, news of their accomplishment was trumpeted around the world in the press, in movie theaters, and on radio and television, then in its infancy. Parades were held to honor this new breed of scientist-hero. Many were excited by the glitz or stirred by patriotism. A smaller number, perhaps, grasped the full significance of the event—that this tiny handful of scientists had ushered in a new age, an age in which we were no longer bound in theory or in fact by the earth's atmosphere. The sky was no longer the limit.
Given the excitement that immediately greeted the announcement of its stunning success, why hasn’t Project Diana received greater recognition in the annals of history?
Although Project Diana involved monostatic transmission—that is, sending and receiving signals in the same location—Jack DeWitt and others realized that signals emanating from one location and reflecting off the moon could potentially be detected at other locations. The implications of bistatic moon bounce communication were not lost on the military. After the war, with the unraveling of the temporary alliance between the American-led Western bloc and the Russian-led Eastern bloc, moon bounce was adapted as follows to serve as the basis for spy technology far more sophisticated than anything previously in use: 1) equipment on mobile platforms, sometimes mounted on ships, was used to send large amounts of information via moon bounce without revealing the location of the source of the transmissions; 2) radar was used to intercept signals from Soviet air defense radar systems that incidentally bounced off the moon. Many of the details of Project Diana’s accomplishment consequently remained classified until quite recently, and instead of celebrating its first big success, the Army accorded only subdued recognition to Project Diana.
After the development of networks of artificial satellites, whose design profited greatly from experience gained from Project Diana and subsequent research, moon bounce technology receded in importance and the need for secrecy decreased. Moon bounce communication, generally referred to as Earth-Moon-Earth or EME, is now largely the province of amateur radio enthusiasts, who continue to reap the benefits of military use of the moon as a natural communications satellite and ultimately of Project Diana.
Fast forward to August 10, 1945. DeWitt—now Lt. Col. Dewitt—was Director of the Evans Signal Laboratory in Belmar, New Jersey. The U.S. had just dropped the second of two atomic bombs on Japan, and military hostilities had ceased. DeWitt was scheduled to be demobilized within a few months, and his staff was already being disbanded.
So when his bosses in Washington, anticipating the development by the Soviet Union of long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, charged him with determining whether such missiles could be detected by radar even if they strayed into the atmosphere enroute to their target, Dewitt was ready for the challenge. He needed a distant target for the attempt, and he made what to him was the obvious choice—the moon. He code-named the experiment Project Diana after the Roman goddess of the moon—observing that according to ancient mythology, “she had never been cracked."
He quickly set about assembling his team. To serve as lead scientist, he chose King Stodola, Head of the Special Developments Section. Stodola was an expert in moving target detection who had developed techniques for spotting low-flying kamikaze flights; he had spent most of his World War II career working with, as he put it, the “Old Faithful” SCR-271. With his unique combination of technical expertise, creative problem-solving abilities, and social skills, Stodola proved an excellent choice. Harold Webb, Jack Mofenson, and Herbert Kauffman completed the team of radar engineers. Mathematician Walter McAfee of the Theoretical Studies Group was also indispensable to the Project, which could not have succeeded without his elegant calculations of the reflectivity coefficient of the moon. Members of the Antenna and Mechanical Design Group and other Laboratory components were also, as Stodola later put it, “scrounged into” the effort on a more occasional basis to meet specific needs along the way.
In the waning days of their wartime service, the men began to work feverishly towards their goal. Short on both time and budget, they assembled the major components needed to carry out the experiment by modifying equipment already on hand, including a crystal-controlled receiver/transmitter designed by the radio pioneer Edwin Howard Armstrong. (A detailed description appears elsewhere on this site.)
The results of their initial tests were discouraging. "The equipment was very haywire," DeWitt said later. But at 11:48am on January 10, 1946, they aimed their antenna at the horizon and were rewarded by an answering echo. Again and again they transmitted, again and again the response came back approximately 2.5 seconds later—the time required to complete a round trip to the moon—until 12:09pm, when the moon moved out of range. Harold Webb and Herbert Kauffman happened to be the ones on hand for this momentous event; DeWitt was in Belmar having lunch and buying cigarettes. The feat was repeated over the next three days and on eight additional occasions during the month.
The War Department sat on the news of the achievement for a full two weeks while they painstakingly verified the results. "We had trouble with General Van Deusen our head of R&D in Washington,” DeWitt explained years later. “When my C.O. Col. Victor Conrad told him about it over the telephone the General did not want the story released until it was confirmed by outsiders for fear it would embarrass the Sig[nal] C[orps]."
What followed, as DeWitt later related, was a real nail-biter. Two experts from the Radiation Laboratory, George E. Valley, Jr. and Donald G. Fink, had come to New Jersey along with Gen. Van Deusen to observe a reenactment of the experiment. The equipment had been set up exactly as before, and yet…nothing. "You can imagine that at this point I was dying,” said DeWitt. “Shortly a big truck passed by on the road next to the equipment and immediately the echoes popped up. I will always believe that one of the crystals was not oscillating until it was shaken up or there was a loose connection which fixed itself. Everyone cheered except the General who tried to look pleased."
Once the War Department was fully satisfied that the Project Diana team had indeed bounced radio waves off the moon, news of their accomplishment was trumpeted around the world in the press, in movie theaters, and on radio and television, then in its infancy. Parades were held to honor this new breed of scientist-hero. Many were excited by the glitz or stirred by patriotism. A smaller number, perhaps, grasped the full significance of the event—that this tiny handful of scientists had ushered in a new age, an age in which we were no longer bound in theory or in fact by the earth's atmosphere. The sky was no longer the limit.
Given the excitement that immediately greeted the announcement of its stunning success, why hasn’t Project Diana received greater recognition in the annals of history?
Although Project Diana involved monostatic transmission—that is, sending and receiving signals in the same location—Jack DeWitt and others realized that signals emanating from one location and reflecting off the moon could potentially be detected at other locations. The implications of bistatic moon bounce communication were not lost on the military. After the war, with the unraveling of the temporary alliance between the American-led Western bloc and the Russian-led Eastern bloc, moon bounce was adapted as follows to serve as the basis for spy technology far more sophisticated than anything previously in use: 1) equipment on mobile platforms, sometimes mounted on ships, was used to send large amounts of information via moon bounce without revealing the location of the source of the transmissions; 2) radar was used to intercept signals from Soviet air defense radar systems that incidentally bounced off the moon. Many of the details of Project Diana’s accomplishment consequently remained classified until quite recently, and instead of celebrating its first big success, the Army accorded only subdued recognition to Project Diana.
After the development of networks of artificial satellites, whose design profited greatly from experience gained from Project Diana and subsequent research, moon bounce technology receded in importance and the need for secrecy decreased. Moon bounce communication, generally referred to as Earth-Moon-Earth or EME, is now largely the province of amateur radio enthusiasts, who continue to reap the benefits of military use of the moon as a natural communications satellite and ultimately of Project Diana.