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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.
Hehe,
:-)
Lets just hope the engineers aren't big Star Trek fans or they'll try building these structures with sound in outer space.
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int main (void) {
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?
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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 -.-- -.-- --..
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
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
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!
I like the sound of that.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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?" `":" #");}