Slashdot Mirror
Radio Telescope Has Military Uses?
schnippy writes "A joint Mexico-U.S. effort to build a monster radio telescope in Mexico is causing concerns because the project, the Large Millimeter Telescope, is part of a U.S. Defense Department effort to develop the target acquisition and directed-energy technology needed for anti-satellite warfare." From the article: " Supporters said links between science and the military are nothing new and emphasized the telescope being assembled on the 15,000-foot Sierra Negra in the state of Puebla wont be some kind of Star Wars defense outpost."
Surely the USA can just use The Force to disable enemy satellites? I mean this is the Star Wars project after all...
Dear AC,
You are hereby informed that you Certificate of Graduation from First Post University is hereby declined. We regret this decision and hope that you join our campus again in the future.
Yours truly,
Bioteq.
"I am inVINcible!"
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
...the telescope being assembled on the 15,000-foot Sierra Negra in the state of Puebla wont be some kind of Star Wars defense outpost.
That's a shame. Puebla does look remarkably similar to Tatooine...
*Obiviously* this story was just thrown in as a decoy, to keep us off track about the conspiracy...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why does this sound to me like a "bad idea"? This would be a great start for a thriller/action movie ...
hmm. i don't think the potential targets of this thing belong to countries that have the means to attack installations in mexico/USA.
Since the link between science and the technology of war or peace, depending on your perspective, are entwined why can't it be used for alternative purpose? The fact my microwave oven had it's roots in defense does not stop me from using it.
This Battlestation is FULLY operational, mwuhuhahaha
Since the article doesn't explicitly state it, what the Mexicans are worried about is that the U.S. of A. will try and use that gigantic dish to fry satellites.
Methinks they doth protest to much in the article.
Anyways:
I found two sites, one saying it's designed to pick up 'wavelengths of 1 to 3 millimeters' and the other saying "to operate between 100 and 300 gigahertz (GHz)"
If they really have military uses in mind (even as a backup) then I'm guessing we won't find out how many watts it can transmit. I did a decent google search and came up empty.
And to make a long post longer, I'm going to bring up an old post I read before (slightly modified)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...people are surprised that a project getting multi-million dollar funding is going to be also be occasionally used by the DoD because it has some military utility? Really people, there is an easy way out if you don't like the idea of the DoD getting a utility out of this dish in exchanger for millions of tax payer dollars: Raise the money yourself.
What is happening is just common sense. There is an expensive project that will benefit scientists. At the same time, the DoD is undergoing a project that will need that exact same piece of equipment. We can either build two of these things and set tax payers back a small hunk of change, or we can build one. Take government money, and take the strings attached.
Now while making government funded facilities duel use makes perfect sense, you can easily argue that this whole Star Wars thing is a big waste of time and money. I personally wouldn't mind a nice big cozy shield of lasers or what not to knock the unlikely ballistic nuke out of the sky. That said, there is a cost benefit analysis that goes along with this. If an impenetrable shield of d00m could be erected for the cost of one month worth of operations in Iraq, I would say go for it. If instead it is going to cost enough bankrupt the nation, obviously it isn't worth spending money on such a remote danger.
Summary:
Duel use facilities when getting government funding to save tax payers: Good.
Star Wars in general: Maybe not so good.
memo to self - must make a thicker tinfoil hat. I can feel the waves penetrating my brain
I was thinking about the revolutionary war. The brits came here hoping to quell the revolution but ultimately were not successfull because they were fighting old wars and old enemies. The brits were used to fighting in ranks, they marched in ranks, set up in ranks, fired in ranks. These tactics were very successfull in europe but ended up being futile against the americans who had learned to fight a new way from the indians. The americans jettisoned both the tactics of fighting in ranks and any "honor" from warfare. Instead of facing their enemy honorably and firing they hid behind trees and used guerrilla and ambush tactics to defeat the brits.
For the last two hundred years those tactics have served the US well. We have continually hit the enemy when they are sleeping, weak, and "blinded" by radar jamming etc.
Now the US military is fighting a war that is as queer to them as the american tactics were on the brits. People with no honor exploding bombs in cities, beheading, hostage taking etc. I often wonder if the US military will meet the same fate as the brits. When I look at a project like this I think they will. They are still fighting the russians and the chinese while the russians have been castrated and the chinese are buying us out.
Time will tell I guess.
evil is as evil does
Um, have you learned nothing from 9/11?
It wouldn't have to be a long range weapon. They could fly a suicide Cesna packed with explosives into the thing and destroy it.
What is a "Large Millimetre Telescope"? A Centimetre Telescope, perhaps?
here is a site with pictures of the constructio progress and a link to a coral cache of the page.
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
Yes! Disguised as a radio telescope, Dr Evil's secret base deep inside an extinct volcano is almost complete. Just a few finishing touches including delivery of the tank full of frikkin sharks with frikkin laser beams on their heads and the world will tremble at the foot of Dr Evil! Muhahahahahaha!
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
seems to focus on the worries of a Mexican senator about the source of funding of the project - mostly DARPA (according to the senator). The question is not what prompts this interest at this particular moment -- because I am sure funding data was available for years to the interested parties. Could the reason for this stunt be the general election in Mexico next year?
Silly Mexicans. They're almost as stupid as the French.
Right. Sieg Heil ! Sieg Heil ! Asshole...
"primary mission is to use radio waves to probe the origins of the universe"
.50 cal Barret and saying it's just for home protection.
and...
"It is a very high-powered, focused radar beam that could be used to find an enemy object out in space and, having found it, zero in on it,"
So the secondary mission is to kill stuff, in outer space, with a focused radar beam. Basically this is like putting a night vision 100x scope on a
-Brought to you by Capitalism. We care, because we know you have money.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It sounds exactly like what it is, a telescope using radio waves to detect objects with higher precision and farther range. The submitter made it sound like it was some sort of weaponry able to use the radio waves to distort, defend, or even attack (read the star wars defense post comment). This is like calling a binoculars, radars, or sonars weapons. They are tools used for detection and has no real defense or offense capability, besides aiding in defense efforts.
HD Trailers
Surely a country that has potential targets for the US to track (and attack) in space will also have the capability of attacking a radio telescope... no?
WTF is my regular google/apple cuppa?
How large would a large millimeter be?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
NASA is now, has always been, and always will be, a branch of the military. One. Hundred. Percent.
The locals call it EL RADAR; they think it has some dark military purpose.
The radio telescope in the Stanford foothills, now generally regarded as a benign feature of the landscape, pretty at sunset, and occasionally used for research, was originally commissioned to study nuclear explosions in space. I don't know very much about the history of the project, except that its true purpose was almost certainly kept secret. That was military S.O.P. for weapons research, and there had been massive protests against Stanford Research Institute, the owner of the dish, for its involvement in "evil" military research. Even today few people are uneasy about the origins of the dish, because few people know.
Do they come in varying sizes?
Classical Civilizations, and why even an early America faced similar challenges. The solution was simple. Exterminate your enemies until they make a "Fight No More Forever" speech, and then generally make note of it and finish them off, occasionally destroying all evidence at hand that they even existed. This is why those forms of insurgency fell out of favor. Genocide was a common, and effective response.
And what this has to do with a big antenna pointed up.... well we can only wonder.
Wasn't this already a Bond movie?
We hear that NASA wants to wind down space science funding at the same time that the DoD is ramping up the weaponization of space. What kind of bullshit mythology are they going to try to sell this one with? It'll shoot down meteors?
More likely it will shoot down everyone else's spy and comm sats. Expect to see a bunch of mysterious 'failures' from competing countries.
Inconceivable!
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
France!0
Hence the statue of liberty. See:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/10/19/193648/4
Be they alive or be they dead,
I'll grind their bones to make my gas!
If only Ash had known about that in Army of Darkness... (Hmm, "to make my un-lead"?)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Yes. He's had a hard day's night.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Really people, there is an easy way out if you don't like the idea of the DoD getting a utility out of this dish in exchanger for millions of tax payer dollars: Raise the money yourself.
Is the DoD suddenly a profitable organization, kind enough to sahre some of these profits with science projects? Last time I checked the money was raised by "ourselves" through taxes and borrowing from future generations.
Yes, sticking your head directly in front of an active (sending) radar antenna will be quite unpleasant. Being hit over the head with one would be, too. That doesn't mean it's sensible to use a radar antenna as a weapon, much less passive antennas like in this here telescope.
Is anybody seriously thinking these things work anything like a simple ship's radar? Yes, you could make them into weapons. By scrapping them, then building new, emitting antennas in their place. These things are receivers. They don't send. If we would try deep space astronomy by sending stuff at stuff billions of lightyears away, we would take 2*billions of years to get any results. The pace of space science may seem slow, but it's certainly faster than that.
"The Large Millimeter Wave Telescope (LMT) program is the U.S.-complement to a coordinated U.S.-Mexico project. The DARPA program is providing technology assessments for design, systems integration and technology-leading metrology for a 50-meter aperture, fully steerable millimeter wave radio telescope. The fully developed telescope features a sophisticated laser metrology system to maintain precise alignment of the optics, and real-time closed loop adaptive control to maintain a near-perfect parabolic surface at all pointing angles and under most environmental conditions."
Metrology: the science that deals with measurement.
Doug Jensen
You know the military has interests in almost every sector, and they view every sector as something they may possibly use. If you could jam, or hack a satellite from your opponent vs. dropping bombs or sending in forces then how many lives did you save? Defense is not always about killing defense is protection. And people in charge of National Defense need to think of different ways we could defend out nation, It it doesn't require violence all the better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It would make a very large wifi access point!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
US College students have been working on that for years. :-)
They may want to fry satellites with this, but they'd have an easier time selling it to the public as a defense system against virus infected birds. Wake me up when the household version that kills flies and termites is ready.
Instead of cooking a perfectly good satellites, there either should be a remote way of hacking satellites to make them friendly, or teams that go up and modify them. If these guys had been watching Mission Impossible (1966-1973 tv show) instead of playing violent video games as kids we might get some more creative solutions.
This project is pretty obviously targeted at simply constructing a usable radio telescope for scientists, but the reason the military is funding it is because the research and development done in designing various facets of the telescope have military applications. The military then takes the results of that research and applies it to their own terrestrial or satellite-based devices for actual weaponization.
The military does this all the time. They fund a huge array of projects, many of which don't directly have a production-level deliverable, but which extend science and engineering so that the next funded project can come up with a military-use prototype.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
"There is a line, an imaginary line, and we have to be careful not to cross that line," she said of the proximity of science to military purposes.
Because, we all know that scientists would NEVER cross that line, right?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
not necessarily. potential space targets could be, for example, tv || communication satelites.
however, before the US are using this as a weapon i think they will protect it with some SAMs. (have a look at these pictures, it's really in the middle of nowhere, it wouldn't be a problem to identify attackers)
i guess many potential "terrorist" countries have their own satelites, but i can't think of any that have stealth bombers...
u really think the great US of A can't protect a "star wars outpost" in a desert from kamikaze-cesnas?
Go climb the platform for the radar system at your local airport and sit up there for a few hours. Make sure your head is high enough to get in the beam.
The link between science and military goes back to the dawn of science.
Galileo based his design for a telescope on that of a military field glass (used for seeing enemies from afar). He used it to study the motion of the stars, the first one to do so, and helped to usher in the age of enlightenment.
I was born in Mexico City and lived in Puebla for 23 years, now I've been in the US for 6. Since I just found out about this I had to read a few more articles on the web. I'm going to say that I'm somewhat concerned. The media in Mexico have concentrated mostly on the scientific aspects of the telescope and also talked about the benefits it will bring to the community. Examples of these are:
1) In the search of the ideal place to build the telescope it was required to do meteorological studies which can be used to know with detail the water distribution underground of regions such as the state of Puebla. These can have positive repercussions in the use of water in the future.
2)It will be necessary to build a rode or highway that will reach the peak of Sierra Negra, one that will be useful for the population of communities like Texmalaquilla.
3)The construction of the telescope will provide of new jobs, many of them to people who live in close communities to Sierra Negra.
4)The need of high tech communications for the LMT (Large Millimeter Telescope) may lead to the result that close by communities will benefit of a modern phone system, maybe based on fiber optics with access to the Internet.
5)Besides local impact, the LMT has already began the development of microwave laboratories and other type of technologies such as the measurement and production of high precision surfaces.
The high altitude is strong point of Sierra Negra for astronomical purposes but at the same time is a weak point since human work is affected because of the lack of oxygen. It is a sure thing that dorms will be installed at lower altitudes such as it occurs in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. It is probable that the telescope can be remotely operated without the astronomers need to climb higher than 3,000 -3,500 meters.
The media talks about this project as the most important achievement in the scientific history of Latin America and internationally as the biggest instrument of its kind. Last time I've hear a sales pitch like this one I was in high school and they were talking how great NAFTA was going to be. Sold as the first step into becoming a first world country. Now 13 years later we've got a disappearing middle class.
The main source I'm quoting is originally in Spanish http://www.inaoep.mx/~rincon/sierra_negra.html written in 1997. I did a fast translation of it. As of now 90% of the construction has been completed and should be operational by the first quarter of 2006. I will now try to research what has actually happened and if this telescope has helped Puebla or not. I have relatives still living there and I will ask them what they have heard. I will post any significant findings for those that are interested in any type of followup.
The USA's space program policy, development and implementation was carried out by Hitler's Nazis scientists. The lead Nazis who started and ran the USA space program - was personally responsible for murdering 20,000 citizens who were slaves in his factories producing rockets for the Nazis.
The language found in current USA government documents sound like it was written by Hilter and his henchmen - and makes it clear that the USA intends to dominate space - in order to dominate this planet - forever.
The fact is that professors at universities in the USA are mandated by the administration bring in research grants to the university in order to have funds to pay T.A.s (teaching assistants) and have varsity football teams. The smoke screen term used for this is - "publish or perish". Whereby a professor is supposed to publish articles in journals in order to make the university - "look good". But it all about "free" money.
A nasty example of USA military funding universities - Canada's McGill University took research money from the USA military to do research on psycho-tropic drugs. To see if they could lace the drinking water of a city to control a city or a country and save on bombs. The McGill professors then used unsuspecting women who had just given birth and were suffering postpartum blues (a normal condition after giving birth) - to experiment on - by giving these women a variety of military drugs that nothing to do with the postpartum blues. Many of these women went on to commit suicide and those who survived were severely crippled emotionally. Years later - when this research got into the public realm - the lead scientist (a medical doctor) at least committed suicide - but others responsible at the university and in the USA of course didn't do anything nor was anything done to them (except made Vice- President?).
"It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."--Abraham Lincoln.
Holy smokes! So, NAFTA was a bad idea for Mexico also?
There are vast swathes of the US, like ghost towns now because of the crummy thing. NAFTA come in, take all of the primary jobs / shutdown all the factories.. Walmart come through, finish the town off.. All that's left is tumbleweeds.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
Is is really that important to DoD for this thing to actually BE a weapon? As long as it could give them the "heads up", don't they have other ways of extiguishing the threat?
Ok, everyone who read that and believes it, please turn off your computer, disconnect from the Internet and never, ever use them again. This is especially true for liberal Europeans who believe the USG is evil.
After all, core pieces of Internet technology was DARPA funded in the early days and goodness knows at least SOME technology in your PC benefited from DARPA funding at some point or another.
WTF?
-
'You can take away my mod, but you'll never take . . . my freeeeedoooom!'
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Personally, I'm disgusted by cowardly twits, here and abroad, who want to benefit from U.S. military protection but aren't willing to assist it by doing anything about vile ideologies and governments. (Think France and Germany.) I'm also sickened by a radical left that, after the fall of the USSR, is now in bed with Islamic terrorism. No longer able to go to Karl Marx for excuses to kill, they're attracted to the Koran. (I'm looking at you A.N.S.W.E.R.) Nor do I care for alleged defenders of human rights--including those on Slashdot--who attack the U.S. as a police state but say not a word about brutal, murderous tyrannies around the world. (UN, are you listening?)
And compare the pettiness of the media attacks on Bush with their virtual silence about the hundreds of thousands of bodies being dug out of mass graves in Iraq. I make no bones about it. If I thought my freedom and human rights depended on the likes of the New York Times, I'd be as terrified as if those rights were in the hands of some skinhead, neo-Nazi group. Most of the Oldstream Media in this country seems caught up in the Bush Derangement Syndrome and can't think straight, particularly the AP.
And I might add that those Mexican ideologes are also a bit stupid. A telescope in Mexico is poorly placed to counter a missile coming at the U.S. from one of the today's rogue states (i.e. North Korea or Iran). It is for scientific research and the U.S. military is doing Mexico a favor by funding it. And if the U.S. military wanted a giant dish to fry spy satellite electronics, they'd place it on an empty Pacific island, in Alaska, or in a country where the people and politicians have backbones--a country like Australia, Poland, or perhaps Denmark. In short, countries that are like Tolkien's brave Rohan.
They wouldn't pick one of the invertebrate, 'jellyfish' such-up-to-tyrants countries such as France, Germany, Canada, or perhaps Mexico. Never forget, fair-weather friends and allies aren't friends at all. When you really need them, they will desert you.
--Mike Perry, Seattle, Author: Untangling Tolkien
The local Puerto Ricans were worried that the Arecibo radiotelescope had a military purpose, and they did indeed call it "el radar". That part of the movie "Contact" was based on real events.
Some thought that it was designed to steer Soviet bombers away from the U.S. and fool them into dropping their bombs on "less valuable" real estate, i.e. Puerto Rico. The observatory had to put up a big security gate to discourage possible vandalism.
I am not sure what you are getting at. A laser metrology system is used to measure, very precisely, the positions and orientations of all the optical components inside the imaging system. This way you can focus it up somehow (there are a variety of ways to do this), then your laser metrology system measures the positions of all the relevant components in the system. Then when you move your telescope around and things shake, or gravity sag, or whatever, you know where all the optics are supposed to be and you can re-position them with actuators so that the system returns to its focus position. This has nothing to do with shooting out lasers for measurement (that would be satellite laser ranging (SLR), which is already done to measure the distances to sateliltes).
Geophysics? Largely funded by DoD. They want a basic understanding of earthquakes and an ability to distinguish them from underground nuclear tests.
Solar physics? Largely funded by the Air Force. They want to predict solar flares that may interfere with communication.
Astrophysics? Not by a majority percentage, but at least some funding will piggy back on laboratory duplication of the high temperatures and pressures that occur in nuclear weapons.
Internet? No further remarks necessary.
I will agree that it's a shame, but companies (and sadly to a growing degree universities) these days don't seem to want to invest in high risk long term research. Few things provide the motivation for these big and basic projects that war does. If people are all that concerned, they should put their money where their mouths are instead of rewarding companies that look good to Wall Street.
An interesting aside: a significant amount of university research in the U.S. is funded by foreign countries - Japan being one of the bigger contributers.
I was observing that the description at globalsecurity.org stated that the use of a laser here was for metrology of the optics, not for shooting down enemy satellites etc. as some posters have suggested or alleged.
Doug Jensen
That's why the Chinese police is killing protestors again? Or maybe the buildup in aviation and naval forces to take Taiwan is part of the "peaceful awakening".
The United States and NATO procure weapons and technologies for the fight 15-25 years in the future. The F-22, F-35, Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab Gripen, ABL and other systems are not to fight this war but the war down the road. The F-15s, F-16s, Jaguars and Tornados are fighting this war just fine.
The United States and NATO really are looking at three or four main threats in the next 25 years, China, North Korea, Iran, and rogue states/breakaway states. As the US grows closer to India, I'm sure at some point down the road Pakistan will be on the list of threats too.
Sorry. I mis-read it to be that you were suggesting there was some sort of nefarious laser to be used (because, as Hollywood movies have shown us time and time again, lasers and the military always mean something is going to be destroyed).
I doubt this is true. A radiotelescope is essentially a radar set without the transmit side. It would seemingly be trivial to outfit the telescope with a blanker that would protect the sensitive receive side while transmitting. If what you are saying was true, radar would be impossible - the first time the system emitted a pulse, it would "fry the detectors".
Sean
The idea that this particular telescope could be used as a weapon is pretty silly. Here's why:
1) You couldn't track very many things with it. The telescope is 50 m diameter, so to get it to slew fast enough to track anything other than a relatively geostationary satellite, while still maintaining adequate focus would require a control system that would cost much more than 100 million dollars (so you couldn't even come close to shooting down a missile). Unless DoD is concerned about using it against ET, this instrument has NO military value.
2) It would be much cheaper and more effective to send a missle to shoot down a sattelite. Unless you are going to put obscene amounts of energy into the dish, you couldn't do much, and frankly you would probably do the most harm to the electromechanical adaptive optics systems of the telescope.
So why does DoD fund this?
Some day they might apply the same "adaptive optics" focusing systems on a space or airplane based platform to pinpoint mm-wave emitters to high accuraccy (so they can "zero in" on radars or high frequency communication links)
-----
I may be an AC, but I'm also a RA
http://www.naic.edu/public/about/photos/hires/aovi ews.html
Arnie!