First Artificial Aurora May Lead to Night Sky Ads

An anonymous reader writes "LiveScience is reporting that the military's HAARP project has had its first success generating artificial light displays in the ionosphere. They created little green speckles of manmade aurora within an existing auroral display. The work is designed primarily to 'enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.' Next up: sky-high neon advertisements."

Comments

High-energy particle "wind"

[Dancin_Santa]

The ionosphere is an amazing thing. Circling and enveloping the Earth from pole to pole, it captures and blocks much of the deadly radiation from the Sun. Without it, we'd be as dead as Deimos.

So what's the big deal with shooting a few billion particles at it from ground level? Well, those particles, if you've studied any physics at all, are highly charged and very high in energy. That means that as they travel through the ionosphere, they are blasting a hole (albeit on a tiny scale) through the atomsphere. These holes, unlike the Aurora activity caused by the Sun, are directed straight through. The Sun's rays travel perpendicular to the ionosphere, so although there is a lot of particle activity from the Sun, it is mostly absorbed and bent in to the shape of the Van Halen radiation belt. It's a good system, and produces some really beautiful natural artwork.

But poking holes in the ionosphere that lead directly out can lead to any number of consequences. The least among these is that the ionosphere somehow regains and replenishes itself with charged particles. The worst is that a "leak" in the ionosphere leads to a complete destruction of the radiation-blocking area that keeps us alive.

Put advertisments on the Moon, or fly giant reflective satellites around the Earth. Just don't be trying to put a hole in our ozone on purpose.

Re:Doing this since the 50s

[hairykrishna]

I believe they did this already in the '50s by detonating nuclear warheads in space.

You see, I read this and I thought: "No way. We never set any nukes off in space. That'd be crazy".

10 minutes with our friend google.

We're crazy. From wikipedia - "On July 9, 1962, Thor missile 195 launched a Mk4 re-entry vehicle containing a W49 thermonuclear warhead to an altitude of 248 miles (400 km). The warhead detonated with a yield of 1.45 Mt. This was the Starfish-Prime event of nuclear test operation Dominic-Fishbowl". Ionosphere's ~80 to ~400 kilometres up by the way. Reading around about this test seemed to indicate that our madness did achieve a pretty badass light show (your patriotic tax dollars at work)- couldn't find a photo though. This wasn't the only high altitude test by any stretch of the imagination either. Another fun fact: In total the USA has carried out 1,030 nuke tests with 1,125 seperate devices.

It's things like this that make me marvel at the fact that we've made it this far without wiping ourselves off the face of the planet.