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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.
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
The one that begins with the letter L is real.
The other is from a fiction TV show.
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?
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make install -not war
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.
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 not. This article is fairly old, I wonder how much further along they are:
Phaser
A ray gun that can stop people in their tracks without harming them may sound like science fiction, but some experts believe it could soon be reality.
The gun is designed to zap its victim with an electric current, using a laser to carry the charge along a beam of ultraviolet light.
The light particles, called photons, would create a path through the air that will be capable of conducting electricity up to a distance of about 100 metres (330 feet).
When the current hits someone, it would interfere with the tiny electrical charges that control the victim's muscles, making movement impossible.
Vital organs protected
But vital organs like the heart and diaphram would not be affected because they are protected by a greater thickness of body tissue.
Corinne Podger of BBC Science: "The stuff of science fiction". Weapons that freeze muscles are already on sale in the United States, but in order to work they have to be held against the victim's skin. They also have to be recharged after each use.
Apart from having a considerable range, the new 'freeze ray gun' could in theory be fired around corners if mirrors were used. It could also have a constant power source.
Talks in California
The gun is the brainchild of American inventor, Eric Herr, vice-president of HSV technologies. Scientists from the UK's Defence Evaluation Research Agency have already been to California to discuss it with him.
No details of the discussions have been disclosed, but a spokesman for the UK Ministry of Defence said the weapon's potential uses were being considered.
So far, Mr Herr's ray gun remains just an idea. He has taken out a patent on the device, but has yet to raise the $500,000 needed to build a full working prototype.
'Ideal weapon'
Initially, the 'freeze ray' could be the size of a small suitcase, but might eventually be reduced to something more like a flashlight.
Mr Herr believes it could be an ideal weapon for peace-keeping forces, or police facing violent criminals.
But already the project has its critics. They argue that such a laser would be impractical in many situations, and could easily damage the sight of innocent by-standers.
Link to HSV Tech
http://jesus.everdense.com/
A basketballhoop? That's what? (1/15)*Volkswagen Beetle?
I'm Dutch. We play soccer, not basketball.
Insensitive clods.
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?
you're thinking of red lasers. Red light passes through air much better than the higher frequencies (blue, green, yellow, etc). A great example of this is the color of the sky. Light from the sun passing through the atmosphere has its blue components scattered much more readily than the lower freqency components, so you see the sky as being blue. When the sun is rising/setting you see the sky as red because red light isn't scattered well the red light that reaches your eyes is much more intense
so, why are these people using green light that they know will be scattered? Because that's exactly what tells us stuff about the atmosphere!how much was scattered at position x compared to position y? how much was scattered at time t1 as compared to time t2?
The pollution causes more light to be scattered, for sure, but that's not WHY you see the light. Rest easy :)
...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."
Laser stands for:
Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
Maser stands for:
Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
Phaser stands for:
Plaid Hippopatamus Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Rotund-mammals.
That's why phasers are so powerful, imagine being bombarded with billions and billions of plaid hippopotami!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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?