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turgid [soylentnews.org] writes:

The BBC has a story [bbc.co.uk] about how a secondary school Physics experiment in 1966 revealed the existence of a secret Soviet rocket launching site.

Physics teacher Geoff Perry of Kettering Grammar School in Northamptonshire was explaining the Doppler effect, most commonly experienced as the change in frequency of sound from a moving vehicle, to his pupils and realised that he could demonstrate the effect on radio waves transmitted from satellites.

Using a second-hand WWII vintage radio receiver and a home-made antenna, the pupils recorded the signals from several Soviet satellites. As the quantity and quality of their data improved, they were able to deduce that one of the satellites had a slightly different orbit from the others and therefore must have been launched form a different site.

Using their data, they were able to determine the location of the second site, Plesetsk in Russia, which was a secret. Officially, at that time the only Soviet launch site was at Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

Original Submission