Echo from Mars

The great radio telescope now under construction at Jodrell Bank near Manchester, England will have a "steerable" saucer of copper mesh 250 ft. in diameter. Acting like the concave mirror of an optical telescope, it will concentrate radio frequency waves sent to the earth by dark "radio stars" and faraway galaxies. Mostly it will be busy with the complex problems of astrophysics, but last week Professor A. C. Lovell, head of Jodrell Bank research station, admitted that the great dish might be used occasionally on projects with more immediate popular appeal.

If equipped with suitable transmitting equipment, said Professor Lovell, the telescope could bounce a radar pulse off the moon and get an echo 2 1/2 seconds later not as a faint pip but as a deafening roar. It might also get echoes from Venus and Mars. If there were a spaceship cruising near the moon, the telescope could track it easily. If spaceships ever cruise among the planets, such giant dishes may guide them through space like the radars that help airliners land on fogbound, present-day airports.

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