[HN Gopher] Faxes from the Far Side of the Moon (2018)
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Faxes from the Far Side of the Moon (2018)
Author : not_a_boat
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-06-12 11:20 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.damninteresting.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.damninteresting.com)
| pvg wrote:
| A previous thread from 2015:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463922
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Faxes from the far side of the moon_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463922 - Oct 2015 (35
| comments)
| kej wrote:
| Reusing the surveillance film and fax technology for a lunar
| mission makes this story feel like something out of an episode of
| James Burke's Connections.
| LorenDB wrote:
| Scott Manley has a great video explaining much of this same
| story: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YDs8rz7pRLQ
| dmurray wrote:
| > this might have worked were it not for the fact that one of the
| steel rods in the balloon rigging was 91 centimeters long. US Air
| Force engineers didn't realize it at the time, but 91 centimeters
| happened to correspond to one of the frequencies used by Soviet
| early-warning radar. This caused the otherwise inconsequential
| rod to resonate and glint like a mirror on Soviet radar screens.
|
| This is fascinating. I wonder how unlucky they got - what the
| tolerance on something like this is, presumably 91.1 cm would
| still resonate but 96 cm would not?
|
| Also, if a possible failure mode is "if any of the rods in the
| construction of this stealth device exactly matches the enemy's
| secret number, the mission will be detected" that seems like it
| would lead to some very fun design constraints. Are there any
| examples of designers taking this into account and building a
| device with every component the same size?
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