May 2009
Intermediate to advanced
544 pages
13h 13m
English
New Jersey
Content preview from The Geek Atlas
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
104
Horn Antenna, Holmdel, NJ
40° 23′ 26.61″ N, 74° 11′ 5.57″ W
Evidence for the Big Bang
Down a private road on top of Crawford Hill in Holmdel, New Jersey, is a 15-meter horn-shaped antenna built for Bell Labs and designed to pick up faint signals from an early NASA communications satellite. It achieved its purpose, and much more: the antenna ended up detecting signals that confirmed the Big Bang.
The Horn Antenna (Figure 104-1) was built in 1959 as part of NASA’s Project Echo. Rather than using powered satellites for communication, as is done today, Project Echo involved placing 30- to 40-meter spherical balloons in orbit and bouncing microwave signals off them. In 1960 the Echo 1A satellite was successfully launched and placed in low Earth orbit. Echo 1A, weighing 76 kilograms and made of a mylar polyester film, showed that satellite communication would work: TV and radio signals were transmitted to it, bounced off it, and received.
Figure 104-1. The Horn Antenna; courtesy of NASA
On August 12, 1960, the Horn Antenna at Holmdel received a message transmitted from California and bounced off Echo 1A: “This is President Eisenhower speaking. This is one more significant ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.