Ernst Krause, who had been the wartime coordinator of missile work at the Laboratory, met with his staff and kept a list of possible future projects on his office chalkboard, and a consensus favorite emerged: rocket research. Krause approached the U.S. Army, which was directing Project Hermes - the test firing of captured German V-2 rockets in the New Mexico desert - and secured for NRL a leading role in coordinating the experimental program in which scientists from several agencies and universities provided instruments to be carried aloft on V-2s.

Richard Tousey began to design spectroscopes to measure the Sun's ultraviolet radiation above the atmosphere's screening effects. His first effort, in 1946, went unrewarded when the rocket returned to New Mexico in a screaming dive, ending up as a crater and a bucketful of debris. However, the second flight, in October 1946, yielded the first solar spectrum in the far ultraviolet.

	This file is a work of a sailor or employee of the U.S. Navy, taken or made as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain in the United States.
	This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/PDMCreative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0falsefalse