In January 1946, eleven years before Sputnik, a US Army radio crew in New Jersey bounced a signal off the Moon and heard it come back 2.5 seconds later, and that echo was the first time anything humans made had touched another world

On the morning of 10 January 1946, at a scrubby Army post near the New Jersey shore called Camp Evans, a small team of Signal Corps engineers pointed a modified wartime radar antenna at the horizon and waited for the Moon to rise.

At 11:48 am, with the Moon just clearing the trees, they keyed the transmitter. A pulse of radio energy left the antenna, crossed 384,000 kilometres of empty space, splashed against the lunar surface, and a faint remnant of it fell back to Earth. Two and a half seconds after each pulse went out, a soft blip appeared on the receiver’s screen and a tone sounded in the loudspeaker.

That blip was history’s quietest first contact. Nothing built by human beings had ever touched another world and been known to do it. Now something had, and it had come back to say so.

Read more – Space Daily: https://bit.ly/4gtQgKy