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University Daily Kansan
Miniature Moon, Earth System Is KU Research Tool in Radar
Ping! A tiny, ultrasonic wave starts across a 10-foot tank of water in the Engineering Research Center.
ring: it bounces off a ball about a foot in diameter coated with wrinkle-finish wall paint.
Ping! The reflected sound wave is recorded, just as a radar impulse would be if bounced from a moon satellite to the moon and back to earth.
HERE, IN miniature, is the earth-moon system, and here Richard K. Moore, professor of electrical engineering, is learning something about wave movement and scattering. The knowledge may help guide the first manned American spacecraft to a landing on the moon.
The National Science Foundation today grantd $84,200 to Prof. Moore, an electrical engineer, to continue his radar studies at the KU Center for Research in Engineering Science
The work also has many other uses. It may help map the ocean bottom, determine the way rivers flow, and help in surveys of the earth from high altitude.
What Prof. Moore hopes to obtain from his research is a better theory for interpreting radar wave performance. Some scientists have grave doubts about the reliability
of informatin obtained from current radar studies of the moon.
THE PROBLEM is that no one has ever been able to get far enough from the earth's surface or close enough to the moon to check the reliability of radar signals sent there.
They are doing this in two huge water tanks, of the Electromagnetic Sensing Laboratory directed by Prof. Moore. He is studying how waves move and scatter. These can be water waves, sound waves, or radar waves—they all behave in a similar way.
Since there is no way as yet, to get to the moon to check these things, Prof. Moore and his graduate students have set up a long-range radar system in miniature.
No one really knows, for instance, whether a thick layer of dust envelops the moon, as some suspect, or whether it is covered with lavali-like material.
BECAUSE WAVES do perform similarly, it is possible to learn about one type by studying another. In place of the long-distance radar waves of a moon probe, Prof. Moore is substituting tiny sound waves broadcast through water. He is able to duplicate the 250,000 miles or so to the moon within the confines of
a 10-foot tank.
Prof. Moore has been studying radar waves bounced off the earth and moon for the past 10 years. He was part of a scientific team of the Sandia Corporation which made one of the first comprehensive radar studies of the earth's surface directly beneath an airplane. Later, he analyzed these findings at the University of New Mexico as part of a study of radar performance.
Right now, he's analyzing radar returns from the Canadian satellite, "Alouette," in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
These new studies just authorized by the National Science Foundation will be a continuation of Prof. Moore's work with radar-in-miniature. In earlier research, he used the miniature system to bounce signals off an object, then measure them as they returned to the point of broadcast.
THE NEW research will measure signals sent from one point, scattered from the ground, then received at another. Some radars operate this way to get different views of an object.
Wednesday, Nov. 13, 1963
New TV Channels for KU Area
The recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission to expand the television channel assignment table has resulted in the addition of two new channels in this area.
In its action the FCC added channel 73 to Topeka and channel 81 to Kansas City, Mo.
The new addition to the Topeka allotment brings the number of television channels assigned that city to five. Two of the channels, 11 and 48, are earmarked for educational purposes.
Kansas City has seven channels. Four of them now broadcast. Only
one channel is assigned for educational television, broadcasting on channel 19.
Lawrence, which lost channel 11 to Topeka last year, retained channel 17 in the new table for commercial use.
Private Party
LONDON—(UPI)—Daniel Lyons, 39, was acquitted yesterday of driving his road roller while drunk on the grounds that he was driving on private property and was not endangering other drivers.
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