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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.
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
The one that begins with the letter L is real.
The other is from a fiction TV show.
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
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."
A basketballhoop? That's what? (1/15)*Volkswagen Beetle?
I'm Dutch. We play soccer, not basketball.
Insensitive clods.
They have lots of mountains that could be hollowed out to make ideal bad-guy secret lairs.
There's already one there.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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.
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 :)