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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...
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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...
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Why does this sound to me like a "bad idea"? This would be a great start for a thriller/action movie ...
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)
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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
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.
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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!
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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?
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.
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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.
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.
US College students have been working on that for years. :-)
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.
"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
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 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.
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.