Project Diana  January 10, 1946

Project Diana Site 1946 - Marconi Road, Wall, New Jersey

In late 1945, in the lull that followed the Japanese surrender, a number of scientists at Fort Monmouth's Camp Evans began working on a way to pierce the earth's ionosphere with radio waves, a feat that had been tried just before the war without success and which many thought impossible. Project Diana, named for the goddess of the moon, was designed to prove that it could be done. Begun on an almost unofficial level by Evans radar scientists awaiting their Army discharge, the project was headed by Lt. Col. John DeWitt. Operating with only a handful of full-time researcherd, the project scientists greatly modified a SCR-271 bedspring radar antenna, set it up in the northeast corner of Camp Evans, jacked up the power, and aimed it at the rising moon on the morning of January 10, 1946. A series of radar signals were broadcast, and in each case, the echo was picked up in exactly 2.5 seconds, the time it takes light to travel to the moon and back.

The importance of Project Diana cannot be overestimated. The discovery that the ionosphere could be pierced, and that communication was possible between earth and the universe beyond, opened the possibility of space exploration that previously had been only a dream in adventure films and comic books. Just as Hiroshima opened the nuclear age in 1945, Project Diana opened the space age in January of 1946. It would take another decade before the first satellites were launched into space, soon followed by manned rockets, but Diana paved the way for all those achievements. It even initiated the tradition of naming such projects after ancient Greek and Roman gods, like Mercury and Apollo. For Fort Monmouth Project Diana was a pivotal event that built on World War II expertise, but pointed the way to the future. Page 24 &27.

Above summary from "Evaluation of Selected Cultural Resources At Fort Monmoth, New Jersey: Context For Cold War Era, Revision of Historic Properties Documentation, and Survey of Evan Area and Sections of Camp Charles Wood" by Mary Beth Reed and Mark Swanson, New South Associates June 1996 U.S.Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Worth District