Talk:Project Vela

Quotation?
Where does the quotation in the last paragraph come from? It sounds strange - why would you want to detect a nuclear explosion 186,000,000 miles away (the diameter of the Earth's orbit around the sun)? This information is not mentioned on the Vela (satellite) page. PhilUK (talk) 19:25, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

"Vela Uniform" needs work
The section describing Vela Uniform is incomplete. I would suggest looking at Barth (2003), cited at World-Wide Standardized Seismograph Network (WWSSN), for details.

The section is also awkwardly written. E.g.: the statement that it was "created with the intention of monitoring seismic activity in order to determine the magnitude and location of any covert nuclear weapons tests" is a lot of verbiage with very little payload. (Why not just say: "created to detect covert underground testing by means of seismic monitoring"?) The last two sentences are particularly bad. E.g., where is the verb in "Over time ... stations of seismographical monitoring exist all around the world." Does that make sense?

The last sentence is an oblique reference to the WWSSN, funded through Vela Uniform, and its most notable legacy. The WWSSN was extremely notable in seismology, because before so little was known that it was scarcely possible to distinguish weapons tests from earthquakes. This is going to take a few sentences, for which I currently don't have time. So I encourage anyone else that is interested to jump in. Ping me if you have questions. &diams; J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:35, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

P.S. For anyone interested in this topic there is an excellent source – "The VELA Program. A Twenty-Five Year Review of Basic Research", ~900 pages – available here. &diams; J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:06, 14 March 2019 (UTC)