Earth's Artificial Ring
As a shortwave radio and numbers station geek, I am intimately familiar with the Earth's Ionosphere, that thin layer of magical goodness that allows short radio waves to bounce around and skip across much of the planet.
During the height of the Cold War, American scientists were also geeked out on the Ionosphere, because using it was the only reliable way to communicate over long distances, should ground-based microwave or undersea cable communication become unusable because of those godless commies. Not happy to accept the Ionosphere as nature intended it, they attempted to create an artificial Ionosphere by launching 480 million tiny copper needles into orbit, which briefly gave our planet an artificial ring in 1963.
They called it Project West Ford. The engineers behind the project hoped that it would serve as a prototype for two more permanent rings that would forever guarantee their ability to communicate across the globe.
The project itself was a virtually unqualified success. Though the first launch ended in failure, the second launch went without a hitch on May 10th, 1963. Inside the West Ford spacecraft, the needles were packed densely together in blocks made of a napthalene gel that would rapidly evaporate in space. This entire package of needles weighed only 20 kg. After being released, the hundreds of millions of copper needles gradually spread throughout their entire orbit over a period of two months. The final donut-shaped cloud was 15 km wide and 30 km thick and encircled the globe at an altitude of 3700 km.
The West Ford copper needles were each 1.8 cm long and 0.0018 cm in diameter and weighed only 40 micrograms. They were designed to be exactly half of the wavelength of 8000 MHz microwaves.
Though successful, the needle cloud never became a permanent reality, as communications satellites were developed and deployed shortly after the experiment concluded. The copper needles' orbit eventually decayed, and they drifted back to Earth in the 1970s, untouched by the atmosphere due to their tiny size.
Many of the needles gathered together in Las Vegas in 1982, where they can still be seen performing "Rocket Man," nightly at the Stardust.
(via reddit)
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