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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."
Get many sharks there?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Stop humping the laser!
Yeah I actually did watch a Val Kilmer film, But I was young so please forgive me :)
From the article:
"The company has taken special precautions to protect aircraft and birds that might fly into the beam."
I hope all those ducks got the memo.
"If you see a piercing green light shooting into the sky Sunday night, it's not aliens, it's the work of scientists at Ball Aerospace.".. That`s what they want us to believe! Do not go with strange green men into theyr flying saucers on sunday - they are NOT going to give you candy as they surely will tell you .
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
Oh, the humanity!!!
PS, Slahdot is fucked. "Score: -5, Bad Pun" is being parsed as no topic at all.
Hate me!
British secret agent in Denver!Witnesses say he drives a cool car with lots of gadgets. Single women beware!
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
will some kind person in Colorado video tape this event and put up a torrent for it.
:)
Please
Hehehehehe! Hoo-whee! You guys really crack me up...
...sixteen people reported blind by staring at the laser. Theyll be pulling a SCO and suing the United States for making Colorado a state and thus allowing the laser test to go on. Anyone up for a game of laser tag? :D
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.
Did anyone read the part about the radar system? HellO?
Linux: the OS that moves at the speed of light. Pardon me if that was a bit cutting, but I can't resist the burn...
#define DRM chmod 000
They have lots of mountains that could be hollowed out to make ideal bad-guy secret lairs.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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."
You're new here, aren't you?
Well the US army has been testing a airbourne lazer for a while now which shoots down (well supposedly) missiles in flight. I think they got it to work on the ground, no to get it to work on a 747.
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.
From what I heard, the 747-mounted laser was a miserable failure. It seems the atmosphere disperses light so that the laser's power density would become wimpy at a few hundred miles (or something).
But I cannot tell, as I have not heard of the project for a year or two. I am not sure if that means it's a failure or that I am lost.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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
The article says it's "about 40,000 times more powerful than a laser pointer", and 40k*5mW=200 watts. Since the beam diameter is "the size of a basketball hoop", nothing would be bursting into flames, although serious eye damage - to birds or pilots - could result.
Although come to think of it, for a LIDAR application I guess the beam is probably pulsed, so the situation is a bit more complicated. At any rate there's a safety shutoff mechanism as someone else pointed out.
I was wondering about that myself...Where the hell is the focus point? Oh wait, I see now. Had to blow up the picture. It looks like they just blasted the beam out of some kind of an amplifier/emitter thing and didn't even bother to focus it through any kind of a lens...Well, either that or that emitter is some kind of convex lens that amplifies the size of the beam at the sacrifice of intensity. Hard to tell with such a crappy picture...
"I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles."
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
And our top story this hour, the RIAA has commandeered Aerospace's big laser and has started frying mp3 downloaders. When reached for comment, they told us "The lawsuits just weren't inspiring the right kind of fear."
"I like you, but I wouldn't want to see you working with subatomic particles."
Because dust particles or water droplets can reflect it; furthermore, the atmosphere will disperse it. FYI, the sky appears bright because it disperses light (it disperses blue the most and red the least. This is why the sky appears blue during the day and red/orange/yellow/gold/your-favorite-sunset-color when the sun is low in the sky).
In summary, you would see a bright enough beam in the atmosphere even if there were no dust in the air.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
I suspect Marvin the Martian will be disappointed with the outcome of the test:
"Where's the KABOOM? There was supposed to be an earth shattering KABOOM!!"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
A basketballhoop? That's what? (1/15)*Volkswagen Beetle?
I'm Dutch. We play soccer, not basketball.
Insensitive clods.
Zoology interns have to put anti-dazzle goggles on all the birds they can catch.
"Laser System to be Tested on SCO'
AC comments get piped to
~200 W of green light is far, far more than powerful enough to see the backscattered light with the naked eye. Even in a relatively clean laboratory, a 1 W green beam produces enough light to easily see the beam path, along with bright 'flashes' whenever a largish dust particle drifts through. Remember that green laser light is right in the 'sweet spot' as far as human vision is concerned, which is why green laser pointers look so much brighter for the same power.
It's really just 157 pocket-lazers tied togeather with duct tape and flipped on at once.
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
The "common laser pointer" they talk about is one milliwatt(mW). That means their laser is 40W, common in industrial laser applications.
A lightning bolt contains roughly enough power to light an entire city for a second or two; it's about a million volts, and about 10,000 amps on average. That's a -trillion- watts. We're talking a MINOR difference in scale here, my friend. A lightning bolt makes a noise because it turns the air around it into superhot plasma, along with any moisture(which expands thousands of times its original volume when vaporized).
If the satellite were to receive that much energy, it'd explode instantaneously, and no, you -wouldn't- hear it, it's in SPACE, there's no AIR, so there's no SOUND- just wanted to get that straightened out, since you seem to have slept through most of your high school and college science classes.
I cannot -believe- the parent got modded up...
Please help metamoderate.
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).
"The laser system is equipped with radar that will shut down the system in the event that an object is about to enter the laser beam."
How does it work? Does it work? I don't know, but those are the precautions they say they've taken.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I get the part about aircraft, but how will they protect the birds?
This from a country which just finished eating 45 million turkeys?
When this thing hits the moon and destroys it, don't say I didn't warn everybody!
Or the sun! It could cause it to go nova!
I need to upgrade my tin foil hat... it isn't strong enough to resist "lasers" yet.
Learn something new.
First of all, congratulations, you are the first person to ever refer to an Austin Powers movie as science fiction.
Secondly, you say that we have heard of "laster beams." I am unaware of this invention or of its mention in the classic science fiction film, Austin Powers.
"I can't drive 55. It only goes 38."
...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."
There is still no such thing as a phaser, the word has no definition, beyond that found in Star Trek. This device may mimic one of the effects of the fictional weapon, but that is all.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
It's supposed to shoot down artillery shells (i.e. big lumps of metal with no guidance, fuel, or other fragile bits), although nobody's sure entirely how.
You are thinking of a different laser system. There is a ground-based system designed to do what you're talking about, but there is also one mounted in an aircraft for shooting down missiles.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
here, you can see how the laser glanced off its target, without a scratch:
first laser test"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
HI, I am going to get a little technical on you and try to answer a couple of questions.
;-) and they are invisible unless it reflects off of something and enters our eye. Smoke, pollutants, water vapor and dust provide the particulate that the photons can reflect off of.
;-P
Ok first off
Q: "Wonder what kind of sound effects it will produce?
A: None. It requires substantially more power than they are using to ionize or break down air.
Q: "is it just me, or does the laser beam in the picture in the article spread a *lot* more than what you'd think it should..."
A: All LASERS spread or "diverge", the beam from the actual laser is probably ~8 mm or so and will get bigger as it travels. When you play with a laser pointer you notice that far away the beam gets bigger. Imagine this same effect over hundreds of miles. They are taking that small beam that is getting bigger with distance and making it big and focusing it at a predetermined point in space, or collimating it so they can control the divergence and keep it basketball sized for hundreds of miles.
C: "it is infrared making it a bit hard to see with the naked eye"
A: Actually it probably isn't, if it were IR then we would never even know about the test. The media blitz is so us folk in Denver don't go running for the hills shouting 'THE ALIENS ARE COMING! - THE ALIENS ARE COMING!'
If it is green they are probably using Frequency doubling or second harmonic generation (SHG) this is a technique used to produce a wavelength that is one-half of the fundamental wavelength of a laser. For the 1.06-um ( infrared ) fundamental of Nd:YAG, the second harmonic wavelength is 533nm (visible green, by the way this is right around the peak of the color perception of the human eye that is why 5milliwatts of green look several times "brighter" then the same power of a red 632-670nm laser).
In English: Start out with something that is easy to get high power with, IR then put it through a crystal that relases at green.
Q:" Hu ? I though that lasers were invisible because they are made of photons that all goes in the same direction...
A: Photons do travel in a straight path, more or less
Q: "I know that the atmosphere is polluted, but not THAT much, is it ?"
A: YES, if you have enough light energy present, (not in a vacuum) , think search lights.
Q:" Are they going to attach it to a shark's head eventually?"
A: Not for the foreseeable future. A couple of problems:
First: water is great at absorbing light particularly in the longer wavelength (red side of the spectrum) this would severely limit the useful range. And if you did have enough optical power to do any serious damage to anything it would be IR ~100,000 watt range, and water would absorb most of the energy resulting in a large steam explosion at the laser output window on the sharks' head.
Second: POWER. Most lasers are horribly energy inefficient. A typical ION laser consumes roughly 16,000 watts of electricity to produce ~5 watts of optical power (laser light).
Given this, to get roughly 100kw output power on a sharks head the device would have to consume roughly 320,000,000 watts worth of power probably in the form of a chemical reaction.
All things being equal and ideal this apparatus would roughly be the size of a size of a large van, attached to a sharks head...
_Chad ~ Lazer guy....
...which is some 50 miles north of Boulder. Although there's supposedly a snowstorm coming night, right now there are no clouds in the sky whatsoever. Regardless, at present the beam is not visible, and I have heard the same thing from some Denver residents as well.
and the aerography guys know what's fowl and what's weather
But what about..... FOWL WEATHER??!!!
Sorry. It *had* to be said. Whether it needed to be said out loud, well, that's another story.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Watching from downtown Denver, but i guess we missed it? That bites a big one.
Didnt know there were so many CO slashdotters - we should all get together.
Cuz im sure we're all really really cool people. Slashdot readers are always cool. No losers here. Nu-uh.
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"Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" --George W. Bush, in Jan. 2000
The article says it's "about 40,000 times more powerful than a laser pointer", and 40k*5mW=200 watts.
You have to be careful with power measurements with lasers; there are several different ways to measure power and they all come up with similar units...
The key thing here is that this laser is q-switched, while a laser pointer is continuous-wave. Meaning the laser pointer is on all the time, while this laser is on for brief instances several times a second.
The power delivered, during that brief instance, may be 40,000 times as powerful as a laser pointer, which is not really that impressive... that's possible with significant cooling with off the shelf surplus hardware... because this laser might be on for 2 ns and off for 50 ms (Nitrogen lasers have exactly that sort of switching)... if it had a periodicity like that, it would actually be less powerful than a laser pointer in terms of energy delivered over time...
However, if the AVERAGE power delivered is 40,000 times as powerful as a laser pointer, that means the pulses may be a million times as powerful, and the energy delivered measured over any significantly long period of time will be the equivalent of 40,000 laser pointers.
But whenever reading laser manufacturer specs, it is important to know the difference between pulse power and average power...
A magnesium flare is certainly for the brief time it goes off much more powerful than my coffee maker. But that single magnesium flare would never be able to completely boil away 1 gallon of water... which is something that my coffee maker routinely does when I forget to turn it off...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!