I got a science class homework.. How Does Radar Work?

Question

My science teacher told me to do an essay on how radar works since i am her smartest student... he-he.. well i need help with it unfortunately.

Answer 1

Hopefully you will check this question out on the internet yourself -  look at a couple different answers - Read - and take notes - sort the notes into similar ideas - then re write your essay -  

You'll need an introduction, body, and conclusion.



This is what I found

How radar works

Whether it's mounted on a plane, a ship, or anything else, a radar set needs the same basic set of components: something to generate radio waves, something to send them out into space, something to receive them, and some means of displaying information so the radar operator can quickly understand it.

The radar waves are generated by a piece of equipment called a magnetron. Radio waves are similar to light. They are made up of fluctuating patterns of electrical and magnetic energy, just like light waves, and they travel at the same speed—but their waves have much longer wavelengths and higher frequencies. The waves a magnetron produces are actually microwaves, similar to the ones generated by a microwave oven. The difference is that the magnetron in a radar has to send the waves many miles, instead of just a few inches, so it is much larger and more powerful.

Once the radio waves have been generated, an antenna, working as a transmitter, hurls them into space. The antenna is usually curved so it focuses the waves into a precise, narrow beam, but radar antennas also typically rotate so they can detect movements over a large area. The radio waves travel outward from the antenna at the speed of light (186,000 miles or 300,000 km per second) and keep going until they hit something. Then some of them bounce back toward the antenna in a beam of reflected radio waves also travelling at the speed of light. The speed of the waves is crucially important. If an enemy jet plane is approaching at over 3,000 km/h (2,000 mph), the radar beam needs to travel much faster than this to reach the plane, return to the transmitter, and trigger the alarm in time. That's no problem, because radio waves (and light) travel fast enough to go seven times around the world in a second! If an enemy plane is 160 km (100 miles) away, a radar beam can travel that distance and back in less than a thousandth of a second.

The antenna doubles up as a radar receiver as well as a transmitter. In fact, it alternates between the two jobs. Typically it transmits radio waves for a few thousandths of a second, then it listens for the reflections for anything up to several seconds before transmitting again. Any reflected radio waves picked up by the antenna are directed into a piece of computerized electronic equipment that processes and displays them in a meaningful form on a television-like screen, watched all the time by a human operator. The receiving equipment filters out useless reflections from the ground, buildings, and so on, displaying only significant reflections on the screen itself. Using radar, an operator can see any nearby ships or planes, where they are, how quickly they're travelling, and where they're heading. Watching a radar screen is a bit like playing a video game—except that the spots on the screen represent real airplanes and ships and the slightest mistake could cost many people's lives.

There's one more important piece of equipment in the radar apparatus. It's called a duplexer and it makes the antenna swap back and forth between being a transmitter and a receiver. While the antenna is transmitting, it cannot receive—and vice-versa