Great article. Do you plan to make a part on the geostationary signal intelligence satellites?
This is great. The Thor "Heavy Elints" were a big mystery to me.
I'm intrigued by the "Reaper" antenna array.
Ergo, whatever those two antennas are, they are probably not follow-ons to CONVOY. They're something different. According to Gunter's Space Page "Strawman 4 also carried the RM 19 radiometer payload." I don't know where that information comes from. I also don't know what a radiometer would look like. But maybe that's one of those things here.
-how did the PENDULUM system work? What was its value?
Quote from: edkyle99 on 07/11/2016 02:23 pmI'm intrigued by the "Reaper" antenna array. So REAPER was apparently primarily a location locator, and at least one sentence in the official history describes it as having sectors. So apparently it looked down and had (maybe) four quadrants. Depending upon where a signal originated, it could localize that signal, figuring out where it was on the Earth.How it did this stuff is beyond me. There isn't much description in the official history, and I bet that it gets into weird frequency magic, so I'd probably never understand it anyway. Presumably the satellite itself has to know its location fairly precisely in order to pinpoint something on the Earth. But how did the satellite do that? And that goes to the earlier question I posed about the Agena: how did the Agena record north/south/east/west and up and down so that it knew the location of the signals it was picking up?
Quote-how did the PENDULUM system work? What was its value?Based on your article, I am wondering if it was something they did on the ground to get the radar sites to switch on. You know, hand a pilot the task of zipping over the Vietnamese country side at high speed at a set time to get the radars to switch on while the satellite was overhead.
In your SPACEFLIGHT article on this topic, there was a picture of a heavy ferret with rings of feed horns looking out sideways. This configuration would pick up the main horizontal beams from S-band and X-band radars.
More info to be declassified on this subject soon.