Slashdot Mirror
Laser System to be Tested in Boulder, CO
luv_jeeps writes "Ball Aerospace is going to test fire a laser beam on Sunday night, as part of the CALIPSO project. If you live in the Colorado/Wyoming area, chances are good that you could see it. The article, a little light on details, says that the beam could be as big around as a basketball hoop."
We have been hearing about so called 'laster beams' ever since forward-thinking science fiction started using them, such as in Austin Powers. I never thought I would see one in my lifetime, glad to see them finally being tested. So assuming that the "laser" functions properly, does anybody know what it will be good for, other than vaporizing martians?
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
I get the part about aircraft, but how will they protect the birds? I also wonder if this laser is powerfull enough to fry a bird.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
will some kind person in Colorado video tape this event and put up a torrent for it.
:)
Please
Wonder what kind of sound effects it will produce. If the beam is as wide as a basketball hoop, and if the intensity heats/displaces the air in the space through which it travels... Could we expect a sonic boom when the thing is suddenly shut off?!
This is, after all, what one hears when a lightning bolt strikes.
Okay a question, not too related to what is happening in Colorado, but it made me wonder. What is the differance between a Laser and Phaser?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It'd be interesting to see some technical specs on this giant laser, to see how similar it is to the cutting laser I used to work on. I bet that baby takes about 12 hours to warm up. Anyone know what the frequency on the green beam is? C'mon people, get technical! Also, all you people in that area: take pictures!
"I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles."
This test in Colorado points a laser from the ground to the sky. The deployment is a satellite platform to measure the atmosphere. Will the deployed laser be pointed at the surface? Will their autoshutoff radar detectors protect us from the sweep of its beam?
--
make install -not war
What I want to know is how they made it. My laser pointer, and correct me if im wrong, most lasers cannot be seen untill they hit an object, yet, from the pic on the web site , it is shown as a line in the sky. Is it hitting particles in the air to reflect the light to the camera? How does this work?
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
First the laser isn't going to scatter that much and second it is infrared making it a bit hard to see with the naked eye.
from the post
"If you live in the Colorado/Wyoming area, chances are good that you could see it."
from the data on the sat:
"Part of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program, Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO), is a mission dedicated to studying the impact that clouds and aerosols have on the Earth's radiation balance."
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Maybe this could also be used to test bethods of beaming power from space (ala SimCity 2000). If the beam hits the target corectly, maybe there might be a case for bulding a device like that.
also the thing reminds me of the ion cannon from command and conquer, though I know that beam won't have the power to zap stuff from space.
I have a friend that lives in boulder, I just called him on the phone and he knows the area it will be shooting out of when I mentioned Ball Aerospace. He said he will try to snap some pics of it. Ill let you know if he was successfull.
Hu ? I though that lasers were invisible because they are made of photons that all goes in the same direction...
That's why you can use powder or smoke (which is composed of tiny piece of material) to actually see them (by reflection of the photons on the particle).
If it's a real laser can someone tell me why we should see it ?
I know that the atmosphere is polluted, but not THAT much, is it ?
Iraq: war to save the U
While they don't say exactly how powerful this laser is (laser pointers vary, typically 1-5 mW), so it could range from 40-200 watts. That's a lot of laser power. Scatter from dust particles is enough to be hazardous to the eyes when you're dealing with that much laser power.
That is what the radar is for. I'm not sure if it is a conventional radar, or if they send a beam of weaker light surrounding the beam and turn it off if something reflects the light back.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Maybe (most likely) the laser beam has passed through a system of lenses before exiting the observatory like stucture. Maybe after the laser beam has been shaped it no longer is a collimated beam.
I skimmed over the CALIPSO site linked as well as the nasa site linked from that page but was unable to find a detailed explanation of how the system worked.
The explanations did mention that it is planning on mapping the atmosphere, I would venture a guess that they were doing some processing based on known information about the indices of the different regions of the atmosphere and some gathered information from the laser source that had diffracted through the atmosphere and been sensed. Thus it may make sense that they may want an expanded and/or non-collimated beam.
I don't know much about this project, or very much about optics but I do know that not all lasers systems require a collimated beam.
namely at the Documenta 6, developped by Baumann and to be seen here .
Another occasion when art was faster than science ? Well, not really.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Ummm, the very defnition of a laser is that the light does not spread.
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
Laser light is monochromatic and in phase and polorized, but there is no reason why it should not spread. In fact, I have put a lens in front of my laser and it spreads quite nicely.
PS: did you know that air of different temperatures or pressure has a different diffractive index and could be used as a lens?)
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Most high-powered green lasers make green light by doubling the 1064 nm light produced by a diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser. So it's probably 532nm - it certainly looks like it. Google confirms that doubled Nd:YAG is indeed a popular laser source for LIDAR applications. The experiment also uses IR light, so you can conveniently use the infrared pump as the source for that part of the experiment. Another group has done something similar, albeit at somewhat lower powers (i estimated in another comment that the Ball system uses about 200 W (average) of green, while the experiment i linked to uses about 10W of green).
...I remember were (1) the excimer laser that was tested in the first star wars attempts, reagan era - they rolled a clip on the CBS evening news that showed a Titan II boilerplate launch vehicle on a pad, they fire the excimer at it, the middle third of this (100 ft tall, 10 ft diam) sucker disappears and the top 3rd of the Titan falls down on the bottom third.
Gulp.
Then there's (2) the shuttle-based LIDAR, which actually shoots a laser from the open shuttle bay to the ground, and ranges the distance to the ground, to sub-meter accuracy / 1-10 cm precision. This means a pretty darn bright laser is shot at the ground and typically ranges the tallest thing it finds - they hope for canopy for land cover work, but in an open area, it might be you. NASA usually told people it was "like radar" which it is in its methods...
but it uses laser light.
So somewhere tucked into the mission materials for the shuttle flights that contained it is a cute little disclaimer telling you that yes, it is a laser and yes, it could conceivably pass right over you and yes, if you looked up right into the path of the lidar you could get hurt - so FER CHRISSAKE DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SHUTTLE BAY LASER AS IT PASSES DIRECTLY OVERHEAD or words to that effect. But they put them somewhere where it was legally required, buit they did not pass out press materials that said a giant space laser might be shot at your house sometime in the next two weeks... they traded full disclosure for widespread panic.
That plus the innumerable people who would JUST HAFTA go outside armed with jpass and JUST HAFTA look right up the barrel... like looking in the garden hose to find out why the water ain't coming out. Here's your sign.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Nah, this is just the latest idea in snow removal.
Says he who spent today clearing two feet of white stuff from the paths by hand today after the rubber band in the damn snowblower broke.
Its a pity they don't have snow down in Texas. Just think Dubya would have woken up thinking 'hey it must be Christmas', then spend the next five minutes looking for his nose spoon until he finaly remembered he had given it up.
Yeah, we need that laser driven snow clearing. Far fewer moving parts.
I think someone needs to persuade the folk doing the 9/11 memorial to look at lasers. At the moment they are proposing designs with 3000 odd lightbulbs. Chances of that being maintainable are zero. A much better way to do the same job is to shine a laser at a holographic plate. That way you could do names and even have different colors for different groups, the ones in the planes, the firefighters etc.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"it'd explode instantaneously, and no, you -wouldn't- hear it, it's in SPACE, there's no AIR, so there's no SOUND-"
Actually, if you would be looking at the satellite in space and see it explode, you would very much hear it. While it is true that the near absence of air means that a person would not hear any sound from a shockware that travels through the air, but from the explosion that person would very well hear the many high-velocity particles ticking, and thunking against his/her vessel. If you have experienced any explosions of significance, or have enough imagination, you will know what kind of rain of particles I'm talking about. Just a week ago, astronauts were shaken up by a sound that probably was produced by such a space particle. So you would hear the explosion in space, just differently than on earth.
Now about the no air - no sound thing: Things like "there is no sound in space" that they teach kids in high school are ususally oversimplified or just plain wrong. Did you know that black holes actually emit sounds?
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I wonder if there is a reason that three of NORAD's sites are in Canada.....
Fellowship 9/11
Also, if they are claiming a continuous power of at most 200 W ( 4.5 W/cm^2), and maybe as low at 50 W, that is about equivalent to at most 500mW, and maybe a 100mW laser, which is powerful enough to damage an eye, even in reflection, but a far cry from the 10 W lasers that can mark a surface, or the 100+W lasers that can do some damage.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black