Slashdot Mirror
Beaming into Space
HobbySpacer writes "At this week's 1st Int. Symposium on Beamed Energy Propulsion in Huntsville a wide range of laser and microwave propulsion schemes are being presented. The big news so far is the announcement by Gregory
Benford of plans for a test of microwave propulsion with the Cosmos Sail, due to fly early next year. The possibilities of using lasers to deflect incoming asteroids & comets are also under discussion."
I'm waiting for when they can do this using one of those medieval catapults.
10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
Ding!
We should land on Asteroids, dig deep into their core, and use Nuclear weapons to blow the things up. Don't the article writers know any sciece what-so-ever?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Wow. I always thought that the likelihood of an asteroid hitting Earth was low, at least low enough that ther are probably better things to spend one's time addressing... say, hunger, AIDS, yadda yadda yadda.
A larger problem is how to lower the cost of missions to allow for an increase their frequency. If this kind of technology c(w)ould be used to allow humans or unmanned craft more time in space to collect data, I think that would be far more useful.
The quote smacks of FUDing. Oooh, look out! A big bad asteroid could it us! You all saw "Deep Impact", right? Well, better fund us so we can make sure that never happens...
"Content's a bitch."
The inflight meal will not be cold.
Speech: Free
Beer: $699.00
1) Lock all the air and space engineers and astrophysicists together in a big building (with lab equipment, and access to journals and suchnot.) That building at MIT with the mile long hallways would do nicely.
2) Don't let them out until they have a prototype design for FTL.
Physics has become boring and I think we, as a species, have to put our collective foot down as regards this whole no FTL business. You can worry about whether or not black holes emit radiation later, I want a warp drive and I want one yesterday!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
but if it has a "Popcorn" button, it's gold!
Is there enough momentum in that laser to actually change the velocity of a flying windows license appreciably enough to make it miss (assuming it's on a collision course - after all - it might blue-screen before it hits Earth and stop say, 62 miles from impact).
The only thing this laser deflection system might buy us is instead of being annihilated by a really fast, frozen rock from outer space, we're annihilated by a piping hot rock from outer space that turns the Atlantic Ocean into a giant thingie of Jiffy-Pop before we all are vaporized, or have our guts ripped out.
Funny how energy expended always seems to come back and bite us in the proverbial arse... How many more movie references can I cram into this post?
The solution to asteroid collisions was presented several years ago by Pinky and the Brain.
We just build another Earth out of paper mache and move to it before the asteroid hits.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I think you are being way to skeptical here .
Look, you can say all you want but you are talking about something which can basically wipe us. Not to be a controversialist but wherein AIDS and hunger if you aren't there in the first place. Yes, I agree maybe its not top priority as much as the folks quote but its bloody well important. You think even if we spot an asteroid we can do anything about it.....throw a few nukes doesnt solve it. Want us to be sitting ducks and pray ? Maybe you should take a look again about Schu-Levy?
Also how many times will the AIDS+hunger thing come up ? If your view is right then we should stop all technological innovation and start feeding everyone. It doesn't work that way - we should try to fight AIDS, hunger but at the same time its _very_ important to look forward
No offence. Thanks,
vv
Scrambled egg: 5 minutes
Bacon: 20 minutes
Asteriod: 5 hours on high, serves 10-15
-jokerghost
One of the nice advantages of Microwaves over
lasers, is that is really easy to make a stearable
beam of Microwaves using the phased array technique. I you make a dipole antenna and feed a
microwave single into it, the signal goes pretty much everywhere, if you put another dipole antenna, next to the first, the two signal interfere results in a more direction beam. If you
have a square grid of antennas, you get a narrow
beam which becomes more focused as the density of
the grid increases.
If all the signals are in phase then the beam goes straight ahead (also straight behind, so you put a microwave mirror, a metal plate behind the antennas at a (half) integer number of wavelength in distances.
To stear the beam, you just put a slight phase difference between each dipole antenna and the ones next to it, so that the phase difference increases with the distance between the each dipole antenna and the first one, thus the beam is stearable electronically. Because there a lots a seperate dipole antenna, the power in each does need to be to large, so you can use fairly ordinary electronic components to produce the beam.
Imagine, building a simple block of antenna, consisting of a 100 by 100 dipole antenna, each
feed by its own 100W oscillator, and with its own
control and stearing computer inside. That should
be fairly cheap to build. Now mass produce these.
Now lets put a hundred of these side by side in a square, you
get a stearable 100 MegaWatt beam and its only 10meter by 10meters big.
You can use this idea to build with conventional
technology a microwave beam as powerful as you like.
Now you don't get much thrust from just reflecting
the energy, 6.7 Newtons per gigawatt. But a constant accelation over time can quickly build up speed in space. You can get a lot more thrust out of the system by using the microwaves to heat a reaction mass, say water in the target craft. I haven't done the calculations, put a powerful enough beam could be used to launch a steam rocket from the earths surface at very little cost.
That should be slightly under 27000 miles per hour. Furthermore, once it's several thousand miles in altitude it would slowly decelerate and fall back to a circular earth orbit. Thus you achieve earth orbit without the need to propell it horizontally very far. The idea of using the force of photons to push a sail is still out there. It would be more effective to transmit a magnetic dipole of equal phase and polarity from the spacecraft into the microwave and use the repulsion to transmit force through a vacuum.