Bending the Beam

In Boulder, Colo. last week, Roger M. Gallet, a physicist for the National Bureau of Standards, exuberantly described the most dramatic experiment of his career. Said he: "It was like this: whop and then whop." Gallet's "whops" bade fair to change the scientific world's concept of radar and its potential.

Until recently, most scientists assumed that radar signals would travel only in a straight line. But, working independently, both Gallet (rhymes with ballet) and Professor Henry G. Booker of Cornell University concluded that the skies over the earth were full of radar "pipes"--masses of electrons clustered in arching sheets along the curving lines of the earth's magnetic field and extending out into the exosphere, the near empty area of space more than 400 miles above the earth. If a radar signal were beamed into one end of such a "pipe," Gallet and Booker reasoned, the gently bending channel of electrons would carry it like water through a hose to the earth's opposing hemisphere and then bounce it back.

Tilting a 100-kw. high-frequency radar transmitter 71DEG into the night sky near Washington, D.C. last April 22, Gallet aimed a radar beam at what he believed to be a pipe that would carry the signal to a point in the South Pacific Ocean just off the southern tip of South America. Two-tenths of a second later, an echo came bounding back--after a round trip of 37,000 miles.

Last week, with three months' worth of successful beam-bending to back them up, Gallet and Professor Booker were considering the practical applications of their theory. In time, they believe, the bent beam may provide: 1) a new tool for studying the effect of solar eruptions on the earth's magnetic field; 2) a new method for long-range surveillance of missile activity behind the Iron Curtain; 3) jam-proof long-distance communications.

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