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Radio Waves Employed in Space Construction
CDeity writes "Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology claim that radio waves could be used to shape and fuse debris in space to form massive structures according to this article. Scientists have in the past employed sound and light waves to position small particles, and every expectation indicates these techniques could work on a large scale. One engineer estimates " it would take approximately one hour to form a rubble cloud into a 50-meter long enclosed structure.""
They could seek the advice of street bums. They have lots of experience with forming structures from rubble and may provide valuable insight!
and its very cool! At the Space Camp center, there used to be an exhibit where you could suspend in midair some little white polystyrene (?) balls with sound waves. After about 10 seconds the sound would sto and the balls would fall. I was always amazed at it, and always wondered if there were any practical uses for this.
,
faeryman
OK, just tune the megatransmitter to a hiphop station for the structural elements...
classical for the smooth solar sails...
and talkback for all the crap that has to be cleared off the building site.
mi save tingting long peles bilong mi long Niu Ailan.
I imagine results visually akin to a Borg sphere. Does this work on all matter? If so, can we ship up all the stupid people and finally put them to good use?
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
Hehe,
:-)
Lets just hope the engineers aren't big Star Trek fans or they'll try building these structures with sound in outer space.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
I'm really wondering where all the energy should come from.... energy to move these "bricks"...
Noob Astronaught: We appear to be flying towards that small moon.
Seasoned AStronaught: Thats no moon....
Ok,
So I haven't quite read the article but it occured to me.
Is it possible to demolish such a structure with radio waves? Or do the laws that lets you do things one way, prevent you form doing things the other way?
if you can't demolish the structures with radio waves, then what changes once you have built the structure that prevents you from doing so?
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Quite a cool idea. But consider how much output power would be required -- more than any earthly transmitter; and the zappers would require jets and fuel to keep them stationary while they zapped, and an extensive control system for the jets would be needed to shape the rubble into the astroid-sized bust of Jaromir Jagr.
What if his smiling face was looking down at us from orbit? Imagine how many astronomers we could scare!
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When you create a dustcloud in a closed room and ignite the dust with a simple light, it gives a big boom, because the air expands rapidly.
I bet some malicious devices could be created with this technology.
Since I'm currently watching a TiVoed episode ot The Outer Limits where this is a common theme, I have to raise the question of "the promising new technology being perverted into a weapon."
If you can form structures out of crap floating in space, why couldn't it just be compressed into a large enough object to survive re-entry, and sent on its merry way, aimed at what the aggressor wants to obliterate here on Earth?
Imagine if GWB suddenly backed down on all his we-gotta-git-Saddam rhetoric because it was getting hom nowhere and the American people were firmly against attacking Iraq, and then two or three months later Baghdad was mysteriously leveled by an nearby meteor strike one morning.
~Philly
And how long would it take to push debris into an enemy satellite? Or form a large enough mass to plunk down on an unsuspecting enemy?
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I was using one of these radio wave generators to construct my own personal spacecraft last week.
My friend and I were sitting there in the station, and were getting real tired of the annoying noise being picked up by our stereo. We were getting really bored bored, and as you know these things take hours, so we decided to see what would happen when we broadcast some hard rock via the device.
And it worked... mostly. All was going well until the end. All of a sudden, about 3/4 of the way through Jimmy Hendrix playing "All along the Watchtowner", the craft started spinning around wildly, and smashed itself to the moon where it shattered into a million pieces, and then it set itself on fire.
I can't figure it out...
And then my sister put in some Michael Jackson, but I don't even want to talk about that...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Could this be used to solve that nasty space junk problem? As I understand it, there is no known way to clean this stuff up.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Newton's 3rd law (equal and opposite reaction...), according to their nifty little diagram, this would require satelites surrounding the object, and pushing them from all directions, so:
1) how do you keep the satelites around after they start generating their waves?
2) how do you keep them symmetrical? (the requirement is that they set up a resonator, I think, in which case, spacing is VERY important).
hmmmm?
Could this technique be used to take building blocks that have been tuned to be neutrally boyant, and then assemble them into structures using sound in the water, then slowly lower the water and weld each layer as it comes out of the water?
Of course neutrally boyant requires no gasses in the objects that can be compressed, though I could imagine you might have metal building blocks with a gas bladder inside that can be filled by computer controlled pump to make it neutrally boyant to some degree.
Imagine building the frame of a house in a big
tank.
Anybody done this?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
And in other news: I shaped my mash potatos into a fort using only a spoon. One scientist was quoted as saying, "It took him 4 hours, but with enough practice and a bigger spoon, it could be done in an hour."
Yes I do realize that they are attempting to create a more useful structure with the debris, but this just reminds of the innate human drive (of which I fully admit guilt) of breaking things in order to put them back together- only better!
Maybe there is a use for that satellite radio service now...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Dude: Dude, nice techno.
Technician: Actually I'm sending out the construction sequence for the storage module for the ISS.
Dude: Woaw.... Rock on.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
They do have force.. or more exactly momentum!
E=hf=mc^2 -> m=hf/c^2
v=c, p=mv=hf/c
All electromagnetic waves, including light, are made up of photons and they do excert a force. The momentum of light can be calcuated via its frequency. The smaller the wavelength the more momentum and energy it has. According to Einstein: E^2=p^2c^2 +(mc^2)^2 Since the mass of a photon is negligable, if it even has one, E=pc where the energy is dependant on the momentum. C is a constant, ~ 3.0e8 m/s P is the momentum of the photon. Light is both a particle and a wave. P = h/(wavelength) where h is plancks constant. In fact P = h/wavelenght is true for all matter as well. If you want to learn more do some reading on quantum physics.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
For those of us who have trouble reading binary.
Binary to Text converter
I would have to imagine that quality control on something like this would be a nightmare. I didn't see anything in the article that talked about refining the pulverized asteroid. One would think that if you had a non uniform mix of materials it would affect the structural integrity of whatever you're building. Still the idea is really intriguing:
1. Break Rocks
2. Compress with radio wave "force field" (now how cool is that?)
3. ???
4. Profit
I know it's an overused joke but, in this case, it seems to me to be exactly what they're talking about.
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
When Earth is threatened by a large asteroid, everyone should turn their radios on and play loud, annoying music until the rock explodes.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
The only way I can imagine gathering this much energy would be with a massive solar array, one of incredibly large porportions...
...so massive that it would be best built using directed radio energy.
PS - I leave issues of inertia of the transmitting station and also the subtantial risks of a misfire/hijack of one of these transmitters into an inhabited settlement as exercises for the astute reader...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
What I gathered from the article is that they have done proof of concept testing/research using sound waves but would plan to use electromagnetic waves in space.
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
Pardon our dust?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I like the sound of that.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The article just assumes that we all knew about radio waves having force, whereas I was laboring under the impression that they had none.
Photons do have force. In fact, probably the most viable concept for intersteller travel at close to the speed of light is a laser or microwave sail. (You shoot lasers or microwaves at a gossamer sail. This is actually better than antimatter for intersteller travel)
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
This has been a fallacy that has urked me for a while.... now tell me how the hell do we use RADIO telescopes to do research on extraterrestrial phenomenae?
No sound in space huh?! Well, maybe nothing you or I could hear, WHILE in the VACUUM of space.
The only reason we can't hear in a vacuum is that OUR ears need a media such as air or water to carry the sound waves to them. Radio waves which BTW != "sound waves" can travel though space or a vacuum just fine. Again this is why we can 'listen' to natural events like supernovas via our radio telescopes.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Exactly my thought. But it wasn't deep thought.
It was Hactor, built by the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
As several people have mentioned, photons have momentum and do exert pressure (called radiation pressure).
Looking at it classically, though, electromagnetic waves are made up of electric fields and magnetic fields. Electric fields exert a force on charged particles. So if you point a radio wave at an object that reflects waves, then the wave's electric field will push the electrons in the object back and forth. The moving charged particles then interact with the wave's magnetic field, pushing them in the direction the wave was traveling.. Which is the same thing we could have predicted from conservation of momentum. (Warning: IANAP.)
Oh, this is fantastic! Instead of launching building materials into space, you could simply supergun material into orbit or, safer, Lagrange points for longer-term parking, and then coagulate and shape them as needed. Of course space material could be used but if that was impractical for the need -- such as not providing the type of radiation shielding needed, for example -- this would be a cheap alternative.
This is the best news I've heard all day.
My
Limekiller
Could this be used to solve that nasty space junk problem? As I understand it, there is no known way to clean this stuff up.
From the link above: The oldest debris still on orbit is the second US satellite, the Vanguard I, launched on 1958, March, the 17th, which worked only for 6 years.
NASA should take it down with one of the shuttles and sell it on Ebay... I bet some billionaire would buy it.
What is your point? Of course you can send sound through space encoded in some form of radio transmission. But radio is not sound. There is no sound in space. Saying that there is sound in space is like saying there is sound inside the telephone wire. Sure there is information about sound waves traveling through the wire, but there is no sound. Sound is a vibration of matter. There is no matter in space to vibrate. Hence, no sound. (if you want to be pedantic about it, there is matter in space but the amount is so incredibly tiny, on the order of a few atoms per square meter, that it is not worth talking about. Certainly not enough matter there to carry sound).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I _do_ know about the physical processes involved, and while I'm a physicist rather than an engineer (and hence less quick at estimating these things), this idea sounds completetly loony. You'd need to transmit an enormous amount of power to move a big chunk of rock even a small distance, because the power radiated by your transmitter will fall off rapidly with distance, and the rock will only absorb a small part of the radio wave anyway (for the same reason the walls of your house don't block radio reception).
And don't forget - NASA is funding research into an anti-gravity machine too, so the fact that they may be taking this seriously is no sign that it makes any sense....
You don't watch Cartoon Network, do you?
Problem is Mars has also lost it's Electro-Magnetic Field so as soon as you do this the sun's radiation will blast it into space... atmosphere isn't enough. You also need the EMs of an active planet.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
How about this: we capture a small asteroid into Earth orbit, and equipped it such that we could nudge it into different orbits. Then we could steer it into the path of an incoming killer asteroid -- not to smash it but to barely miss it, gravitationally dragging the bad boy off course to miss the Earth.
/. posting about using force fields to assemble objects in space, maybe we could even build our own guardian asteroid from bits and pieces rather than going out and getting one.
Remembering an earlier