In March, an urgent meeting was secretly convened at Patrick AFB on Cape Canaveral to address the issues around testing guided missiles over a West Indies seabed rife with gravitational anomalies.* This meeting resulted in a notable AF push for more research in the field that would become known as geodesy, the interdisciplinary science of measuring and understanding the fundamental properties of the Earth: its shape, its gravitational field(s), its orientation in space, and changes in these properties over time.
Dutch Scientist, Felix Andreis Vening Meinesz, was asked to address the immediate problem. His December report, The Gravity Problem of the Mapping and Charting Research Laboratory at Columbus and Related Problems laid out the principals of orbital mathematics, for perhaps for the first time ever.
Meinesz would suggest how to best locate the equatorial plane in a changing elliptical gravitational field and how observed values from gravitational anomalies expressed themselves at different angles in the larger field. He would describe the equipment and methods for taking standard measurements, and, of course, note that there was still much mapping to be done.
The anomalous areas of concern in the Atlantic Test Range region had first been identified by the Princeton-Navy Gravity Exepidition of 1932, helmed by Meinesz with the support of Princeton scientist, Harry Hess, future father of plate tectonics, and Seaman Townsend Brown. Brown was responsible for the equipment, the calculations, and documenting the cruise for the Navy. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id= ... =1up&seq=7)
And, more importantly, Townsend Brown would continue to work with with variations of Meinesz 1915 pendulum* set up for years into the future.
In 1915 a doctor’s degree cum laude was conferred on him for his thesis ‘Contribution to the theory of pendulum observations’. In this thesis a theory was elaborated, ultimately leading to the equation of motion of a pendulum, whose rotation-axis was subjected to arbitrary translations. The solution of this differential equation is given in the form of corrections caused by the disturbing accelerations, which should be added to the period and amplitude of the corresponding non-disturbed mathematical pendulum. It appeared from the formulae that the effect of disturbing acceleration—of which the horizontal acceleration in the pendulum plane is by far the greatest—on the mean periods of two isochronous pendulums swinging on the same support is eliminated, provided that both pendulums have the same amplitude and opposite phase.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/ ... .1967.0015
It seems quite likely that Meinesz would have been the Dutch scientist Townsend requested to be invited to participate in the Paris experiments. Is it equally likely that it was Meinesz who first brought Townsend to the attention of the USAF?
* Footnoted in A Matter of Gravity: Military Support for Gravimetry during the Cold War by Deborah J. Wagner, In: Instrumental in War, Science, Research, and Instruments Between Knowledge and the World Series: Editor: Steven Walton 2005