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

Who owns the sky?

[RLiegh]

and what's their contact info?

welcome

[subzero_ice]

welcome more light pollution.

I can see it now

[winkydink]

OK son, that's the big dipper, the little dipper, and over there to the right of the Cialis ad is Orion. No, that's not his schvantz, that's his bow son.

adverts?

[Coneasfast]

The process is not well understood, but scientists speculate it could one day be employed to light a city or generate celestial advertisements.

do we reall need. "En|@rge Ur PeNI5" 30 miles high in the sky?

what about a feed of the latest slashdot stories? would increase efficiency of nerds worldwide?

any other suggestions?

No country will allow that, except for fed use

[digitalgimpus]

A guy shines a laser pointer in the Sky, and the FBI is after his ass. You think there going to allow this? I think not. They will consider it a airline safety issue (hence homeland security) until they can pass a separate law.

Then the sky will chance based on that terror warning system.

So get ready for yellow and orange nights!

Re:No country will allow that, except for fed use

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The north pole is used extensively by the US Military. It's the fastest flight path from the US to Afganistan for example. Long range bombers use it.

No.

Military aircraft from the West Coast and mid west fly east, generally to Dover Delaware, then over the Atlantic and "stage" in Germany, sometimes touching down in Turkey before ending up in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We also have some heavy lift in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. But regardless of where they end up, it is extremely unlikely they flew over any poles. Nope, no, don't think so.

I, for one...

[EEBaum]

...welcome the chance to beat the living daylights out of the first idiot to broadcast an advertisement.

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:High-energy particle "wind"

[Antonymous Flower]

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.

surely you mean a Van Allen Radiation Belt

It's more like ion polution

[EmbeddedJanitor]

ions--> chemical change --> problems.

Considering that Freon is a wonderfully inert substance at ground level that gets changed into an ozone eating monster at altitude under high UV, one wonders whether hosing the atmosphere with highly charged particles is a good idea.

I have not RTFA, but I hopefully this is done over the US and not in in a far away place like was done by the nuclear testing bastards.

Re:It's more like ion polution

[MillionthMonkey]

Considering that Freon is a wonderfully inert substance at ground level that gets changed into an ozone eating monster at altitude under high UV, one wonders whether hosing the atmosphere with highly charged particles is a good idea.

Huh? How do you figure this? One thought doesn't follow from the other.

UV breaks the stable bonds in Freon, producing chlorine radicals among other things. This is bad because chlorine in that electronic state does not usually exist there and the chlorine catalyzes the breakdown of ozone.

This "HAARP" process sends radio pulses up into the ionosphere to excite the free electrons in the plasma that exist at that height. The exited electrons strike ordinary air molecules. This is nothing that doesn't happen already. Auroras occur every day. The only real difference here is the direction of the incoming radiation. Thunderstorms have a similar atmospheric chemistry.

Not that I support this development at all- while this may have been a technically brilliant experiment, it threatens to spawn a new form of advertising. This is going to become really annoying if it catches on. And the astronomers are going to hate it.

Nikola Tesla

[FoXDie]

Yet again I have to say... Nikola Tesla owns you.

Yeah, we do

[the grace of R'hllor]

Sure we do. I see an end to spam.

1) They light up the sky.
2) Track the source of the advertisement to a geographical region
3) Shoot the fuckers (for fun! no profit!)

It is a problem that will solve itself.

Re:Yeah, we do

[fireman sam]

"3) Shoot the fuckers"

Do they have to be spammers, can't we just shoot anyone who floods the night sky with any form of light.

For example, Most of the street lights around my area will project light up to 40 degrees ABOVE horizontal. Not only is this a waste of energy but it makes the stars almost impossible to see.

On a better note, last night many parts of Sydney was in blackout because of some storms. Best night to see Saturn and Jupiter and for the first time my daughter found out why the milky way is called "milky".

HAARP is a weapon?

[xasper8]

I am not proclaiming to be an expert on this subject... in fact I am far from it.
But if I remember correctly I believe that I read some articles about the true purpose of HAARP was conceived as a weather control device to be used in a military fashion. Can anyone correct me on this info?
Here is an interesting link - (which may or may not support my post...
http://www.earthpulse.com/haarp/

Excellent

[eremitic]

Batman will be pleased. Now the bat signal will be more visible than ever.

Watch Out!

[tonyr60]

Love this from the referenced articale "We unfortunately were indoors watching the data on monitors during the experiment and were busy scrambling trying to make sure the effects were real and not some glitch with the equipment,"

Picture in mind of geeks staring at glowing screens while the 1 MW RF beam blasts the crap out of a 747 or worse.

Tinfoil hat reference

[wytcld]

Ever looked at www.haarp.net? This project has kept conspiracy theorists busy for over a decade.

Who Steals the Sky?

[handy_vandal]

HAARP isn't really about pretty light shows.

It's about military-industrial applications:

* Detection and Imagine of Underground Structures Using ELF/VLF Radio Waves

* Angels Don't Play This Haarp

-kgj

Re:Who Steals the Sky?

[handy_vandal]

The initial post states quite clearly that a major portion of this is for military purposes, so that was a bit redundant ...

A reasonable objection. However, the nature of these military purposes is not spelled out. The first link in the original post does lead to technical information about the project. But the second link in the original post leads to a lightwight story about the pretty lights, not much more. And nowhere in any of these sources do we read about the radical weapons possibilities, e.g. using HAARP to heat the ionosphere so that it bulges up into space in order to deflect incoming ICBM's.

Furthermore, when I made my post, most of the other posts were jokes about the pretty lights -- I figured those posters needed a clue.

...(except for the "Angels Don't Play This HAARP" mention, which is instead a bit quackish).

Agreed, that book is a bit quackish. But not, I think, entirely quackish -- it raises serious issues, worth considering. In any case, there are numerous reviews from differing viewpoints on the Amazon page, which seems useful to me. I took care to provide the Amazon link, and not a link to some certifiably conspiratorial site such as rense.com, for precisely that reason.

There are quite legitimate reasons for producing an aurora. Amateur radio operators have used auroras to communicate over long distances for decades over decades.

Agreed. All good and fine -- I'm a man of science, I too want to figure out how things work by experimenting with the nature of things. But I wouldn't want to leave the impression that HAARP is pure science and nothing more, when it does appear to have profound military applications which, if misused, could seriously fuck up the world.

-kgj

Re:Who Steals the Sky?

[Evil Pete]

I call bullshit on this. I've been arguing with crackpots for over 10 years about this. It doesn't take much knowledge of plasma physics to understand what this is for and what it can and can't do. People either seem to think it is for a) manipulating the weather, or b) beaming thoughts into your head (I kid you not). Ok, the last one is by definition for the tin foil hat brigade. The weather modification stuff just doesn't make sense. It is bouncing very low frequency radio off the ionosphere ... those layers are way way up above the troposphere where the weather is for starters and if you beam energy using HAARP to somewhere else it will also pass right through the troposphere ... and anyway just think how much energy it would require to alter the atmosphere by inductive heating by a grossly inefficient method using a transmitter that is also very inefficient. Bahh. Silver iodide or just spreading a crop disease is just so much easier.

Bad for animals? Good for war.

[dj42]

Depending on how bright this, couldn't it be bad for animals, insects, life in general? Many animals use the night and day cycles so extensively that if they were "fooled" into thinking it was day when it was night, it could easily destroy eco-systems. You'll often read about how animals get confused during eclipses, think it has become night time. Anytime we significantly alter the Earth's "default settings", we're asking for trouble. Not that I can't see this as being useful if it could be isolated for lighting urban areas, which in turn could save power potentially. It's application in war, to light up the night sky is also incredible.

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.

Re:Doing this since the 50s

[FuturePastNow]

The film Trinity and Beyond has video of this, I think. Incidently, when a nuke detonates in the vacuum of space, it creates no mechanical blast. That is, no shockwave (well, the mass of the weapon itself gets blown outward, but that isn't much). Virtually all of the bomb's energy gets converted into one big electromagnetic pulse. That's how we know about EMP- Starfish-Prime blacked out most of Hawaii.

Re:Doing this since the 50s

[Anonymous Coward]

It's frankly staggering how many tests were done. Heaven forbid anyone else would develop nuclear devices and behave anywhere near as recklessly.
http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/films1.htm
Several pictures of Starfish-Prime about half way down.
http://www.radiochemistry.org/history/nuke_tests/d ominic/index.html
http://www.radiochemistry.org/history/nuke_tests/d ominic/Dstarfish2s.jpg
http://www.radiochemistry.org/history/nuke_tests/i ndex.shtml

Re:Ad Filter

[digitalchinky]

Hang on - let me adjust my tinfoil hat a little - it's a giant death ray.

http://jkidd.tripod.com/b/94.html

Re:Laser paint logos on the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

CHA

Not this stupid nonsense again.

[phillymjs]

It's been tried before, and somehow it manages to get shot down. Astronomers really don't like people fucking with their ability to work, and surprisingly the astronomy lobby has successfully managed to put the kibosh on these sort of things so far.

Last time I remember an attempt at something like this was 1989, when the French wanted to commemorate the centennial of the Eiffel Tower by launching into orbit a bunch of reflective balloons forming a glowing ring in the sky. More info here.

~Philly