Project Diana

For this task he assembled a team of engineers that included Chief Scientist E. King Stodola, Herbert Kauffman, Jacob Mofenson, and Harold Webb.

Input from other Camp Evans units was sought on various issues, including most notably the mathematician Walter McAfee, who made the required mathematical calculations.

Return signals were received about 2.5 seconds later, the time required for the radio waves to make the 768,000-kilometre (477,000 mi) round-trip journey from the Earth to the Moon and back.

The return signals were extremely faint, and the US began secret construction of the largest parabolic antenna in the world at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, until the project was abandoned in 1962 as too expensive.

Today, the Project Diana site is part of the Camp Evans Historic District, InfoAge Science History Learning Center and Museum, and is maintained by the Ocean-Monmouth Amateur Radio Club.

Project Diana radar antenna, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey
Oscilloscope display showing the radar signal. [ 1 ] The large pulse on the left is the transmitted signal, the small pulse on the right is the return signal from the Moon. The horizontal axis is time, but is calibrated in miles. It can be seen that the measured range is 238,000 mi (383,000 km), approximately the distance from the Earth to the Moon .
QSL card for reception reports