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Plasma Resonance Could Overcome Radio Silence For Returning Spacecraft

Posted by timothy on from the don't-keep-that-all-bottled-up dept.

Zothecula points out this article about a workaround for a long-standing problem with space-flight communications: some of the most cruicial time of a re-entry is also time when the craft cannot send data to or receive instructions from the ground controllers. From the article: Returning spacecraft hit the atmosphere at over five times the speed of sound, generating a sheath of superheated ionized plasma that blocks radio communications during the critical minutes of reentry. It's a problem that's vexed space agencies for decades, but researchers at China's Harbin Institute of Technology are developing a new method of piercing the plasma and maintaining communications. This means coupling the craft's antenna to that plasma sheath, "[causing] the sheath to act as an inductor. Together, they create a resonant circuit."

3 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh Boy Chinese Science by PeterM+from+Berkeley · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Chinese are getting better every year, year in and year out. How do you climb the tech ladder? The logical way is that first you learn from what others have done, and reproduce it. Then, when you are caught up, you start to lead.

    And with a billion people, the Chinese have their share , or maybe more than their share, of first class brains. Their culture doesn't sneer at science, either.

    The Chinese are on the fast track to being the dominant world power if their own misgovernment doesn't screw them up.

    --PM

  2. Re:Oh Boy Chinese Science by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'll just point out; It's always a mistake to underestimate your competition. Just as it's always a mistake to overestimate your competition. This sort of argument may work to keep children on the playground from challenging bullies and may keep bullies feeling smug in the short term, but it does not intimidate a mass of one billion people with ambitions to succeed at all costs.

  3. Re:Star Trek solution, eh? by St.Creed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    what can be done in that precise stage so the comunication channel becomes the difference between live and death?

    We can send telemetry, making a difference between life and death for the *next* crew to go up.

    --
    Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)