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Philip M. Lubin
This concept drawing shows the DE-STAR system engaging both an asteroid for evaporation or composition analysis, and simultaneously propelling an interplanetary spacecraft.
By Megan Gannon
LiveScience
A meteor explosion over Russia injured hundreds of people Friday, just hours before an asteroid about half the size of a football field gave Earth an extremely close shave, catapulting the need to protect our home planet from hazardous space rocks into the spotlight.
The two events raise questions about our preparedness for dangerous encounters with asteroids, and by sheer coincidence one group of scientists has just unveiled plans for a novel system to vaporize asteroids in space that threaten Earth.
"We have to come to grips with discussing these issues in a logical and rational way," UC Santa Barbara physicist Philip M. Lubin said in a statement Thursday, a day before the Russian meteor explosion.
"We need to be proactive rather than reactive in dealing with threats. Duck and cover is not an option," Lubin added. "We can actually do something about it, and it's credible to do something. So let's begin along this path. Let's start small and work our way up. There is no need to break the bank to start."
The hazards of asteroid impacts are starkly clear in Russia, where more than 900 people were injured and hundreds of buildings damaged by the shockwave from the meteor's explosion in the atmosphere, according to news reports. [Russian Meteor Explosion Injures Hundreds (Video)]
Lubin and his colleagues have conceived of a system they call DE-STAR, or Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids and exploration. The concept: harness power from the sun and convert it into a massive phased array of laser beams that can deflect or evaporate asteroids hazardous to Earth.
"This system is not some far-out idea from Star Trek," Gary B. Hughes, a researcher at California Polytechnic State University, said in a statement. "All the components of this system pretty much exist today. Maybe not quite at the scale that we'd need — scaling up would be the challenge — but the basic elements are all there and ready to go."
The scale the team has in mind is quite astounding — ranging from one system the size of a desktop device to one measuring 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter — and the capabilities would improve with each expansion.
DE-STAR 2, for example, would be about 330 feet (100 meters) in diameter, or about the size of the International Space Station, and could nudge comets or asteroids out of their orbits, the team said. Such a system would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as it would need to be constructed in orbit from smaller pieces, Hughes said in an email to Space.com.
Taking a modular approach, the orbital system would keep getting bigger. The researchers envision DE-STAR 4 to be 100 times as big as DE-STAR 2 and say it would be capable of vaporizing a menacing 1,640-foot-wide (500-m) asteroid within a year by beaming it with 1.4 megatons of energy each day.
Hughes added that today's events — the Russian meteor blast and the unprecedented close approach of asteroid 2102 DA14 — "should remind us that there are asteroids and comets that cross Earth's orbit which pose a credible risk of impact."
"If we acknowledge the threat of impact, and the potential for severe disturbances to Earth and society, we should be compelled to investigate realistic approaches for mitigating the risk of impact," Hughes said in an email to Space.com. "DE-STAR is one such realistic approach, being based on sound concepts and an existing technological base. An orbiting DE-STAR 2 system would allow rapid reaction to smaller threats. A larger system could defuse any threat if detected sufficiently in advance."
The team thinks their ideas could have implications for asteroid mining and deep space travel, too. The DE-STAR systems could be a valuable tool for evaluating an asteroid's composition and figuring out which lucrative, rare elements it might hold, such as lanthanum, which is used in the batteries of hybrid cars. And a gigantic system that the team has imagined, DE-STAR 6, could serve as a massive orbiting power source, allowing interstellar travel without a warp drive.
"The ability to focus energy on a distant target would allow acceleration of interplanetary spacecraft," Hughes said. "Our calculations indicate that a 1,000-kg (2,200-pound) spacecraft could be accelerated to Mars and arrive in 15 days. Continuous acceleration could send a spacecraft to relativistic speeds, a tantalizing prospect for interstellar travel."
The team is currently preparing a manuscript on DE-STAR to submit for peer review.
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Okay, great. I like where this is going.
But the real question is: will we be able to fire the massive orbital laser at countries that annoy us? Would the atmosphere mess it up? And would we eventually start to build an armored, imposing, moon-like shell around our orbital superlaser?
I mean, I know the online petition to build a Death Star failed, but that doesn't necessarily PRECLUDE the construction of a massive planet-breaking space weapon.
Get on this, science!
I was wondering if it could be used to direct solar energy at a receptor located on earth to supply power when not being used to destroy asteroids. Possibly a lower power setting that would NOT blow away the Earth station?
What fun is that?
I'll opt for the deflection solution, thank you.
You'll know way in advance whether it worked.
This idea of waiting until the last seconds to try and evaporate an asteroid are ridiculous.
.
The catch in this proposal is when the guy says that all the technology "pretty much" exists today. This is where these sorts of projects go awry.
NASA uses line item project funding. This means that a project such as this is awarded, say $4 million, to complete. But the problem is in that there are several scientific discoveries that must be made in order to bring the project to fruition. Some things in the "pretty much" category will fall into place quickly while others will stubbornly resist science until much later. Once the $4 million is spent, then there is a lot of scurrying around worrying about "throwing good money after bad." Usually, the decision is to go ahead and fund the overruns because too much has already been invested to allow the project to fail.
A better way would be to fund NASA on a priority basis. This way NASA would be given, say $40 billion, for all its projects. The projects would be organized into an absolute priority list (meaning that there are no ties for a place on the list.) NASA would then spend the money as far down the priority list as it would go. If a cost overrun, such as I mentioned above, occurs, the funding would automatically come from lower priority projects.
This would not insure that all projects on the list were completed, but it would insure that the money is spent on the most important projects instead of the current mish-mash of priorities.
Just saying .....
SF accountant: A Major War , In todays day and age?? Wouldn't you only need to destroy the opposing countries satellites to get a edge in a war. I'm sure all major powers are equipped to do the job
Funny you mention that Scar..the Russian Science Ministry kind of sounded apologetic(and we should sound a bit apologetic too) when they said in their statement..'Neither we nor the Americans have such a system in place to protect ourselves from these events',like kind of well,implying to us and their citizens too that umm maybe the times come to take a serious look at what we can do to warn and or prevent this kind of thing from happening over populated areas again because there will another 'again'.I mean we have a tsunami warning system in place that works(as we found out recently)and we are working on volcano warning systems as well..
this tech will be abused.... Even if we make this thing cost would be hefty....solution find out where the rock will land and either charge the country or let it hit....2.....shooting a beam through our atmosphere would weaken the beam. but crank up the power or more focus.
The 'easy' solution to prevent earthside attack would be to construct the DE(eath) Star at the Lagrange point on the other side of the Moon. The moon would then be a shield against any possible attack on Earth.
You're kinda sneaking up on a problem. If you build a laser device that could destroy or deflect an asteroid, then there is very little to keep that same device from being used to destroy satellites or even ground targets or missiles in flight. There are treaties that forbid space weapons and these would be very difficult to get around.
There are a couple of options that would help this work. One would be to make such a device firmly under international control. This would insure that only asteroids were targeted because there would be a "fail-safe" mechanism that required several assenting "keys."
Another would be to start with non-military-like activities first. One example would ber a proposal that surfaced with the last near-Earth asteroid. As the asteroid passed, it is painted white on one side and black on the other. This is a matter of a pair of very small bombs, one of which would spread lead oxide and the other carbon black. Less than 20 lbs of carbon black and around 60 pounds of lead oxide would be sufficient for the asteroid that just passed us. Solar radiation would then begin to change the asteroid's orbit. The amount and position of the "white" and "black" sides would determine the direction in which the asteroid was pushed. The principle is the same as the Crookes radiometer.
I keep seeing Mike Myers wearing a bald cap and raising his hands making the quotations sign with his fingers:
"Laser"
Good to know that other people caught the implications of the the DESTAR 4. Aim it at Earth and suddenly we have a real problem with a real tyranny. Any known system can be subverted--it's the nature of technology--and any large energy source can be a weapon.
We probably need to build it, but ojeez, the political consequences...
correct Michelle Rose. As with any humanitarian venture the military has an even bigger interest in it. Asteriod whizzes by and oops, there goes Washington DC or Chicago, or Moscow or Paris or North Korea. Ok , so that might be a good thing. Just get a few religious or ideological fanatics who want to play GOD. Lets let the chips/ meteors fall as they have since the beginning of time. If it's our time it's our time.
boom goes london and boom paris, more room for you and more room for me
Just have to unify humanity, eliminate nations and borders, and stop fighting amongst ourselves. Then we can work together and make this thing, no sweat. So all that's left is to decide on our name...
So a spacecraft could be sent to Mars in just 15 days. How are they going to stop it when it gets there?
Aerobraking and slingshot elliptical orbits.
Perhaps also you can station another series of lasers in Mars orbit so when they got just past the halfway point, you would invert the spacecraft so the 'Martian' lasers could slow down the incoming spacecraft...
Just a couple of ideas...
Big ass planet, I am sure it will stop when it hits it.
Actually, the use of the energy collected by the space craft is not given, may be powering something else that can be configured in the correct direction.
This sounds more like a pipe dream than anything that will actually happen. Where do these people expect to get the money to pay for this technology? I doubt if private enterprise will shoulder the burden. The U.S. government is too busy spending money on handout programs to buy votes to ensure that the pocket stuffers who are in power stay in power. NASA's budget has gone from 4.4 percent of the federal budget at the height of the Apollo program in 1966 to .48 percent last year. Spending on social programs in the same time frame went from 32.2 percent of the budget to 66.4 percent. Maybe the Chinese could be persuaded to fund this program. But don't expect any of the European socialist countries to pony up any money. Except for Germany, they are drowning in debt too.
Show us whaich part of the budget was spent to buy votes:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2013USbf_13bs1n#usgs302
A DE-STAR 2 they said would cost several hundreds of $millions, which is well within NASA funding capability. The DE-STAR 4 is 100 times bigger--that could cost $50 billion, which would very likely prove too expensive.
Nothing is built in just one year; this will be a multi-year phased approach that takes it from proof of concept to full bore that is ramped up each year that is scalable.
Some asteroids are composed of iron, which would seem impossible to vaporize. Also, as stated above, it does us no good to be able to deflect or destroy ans asteroid if we don't know it is coming. At the moment there is either one or no installation in the Southern Hemisphere dedicated to cataloging NEO's. I'm not sure if the place in Australia was funded at the last minute or was allowed to shut down. Given the injuries and damage caused by such a small meteorite this time around, one would hope the space agencies of the world would take the threat more seriously. We know its happened before and we know it will happen again, so hopefully we'll close the barn door before the horse trots off down the road.
If you have been watching the reports from the Curiosity Program related to Mars the rover found two new chunks of minerals on the surface of Mars that are not Martian in nature but are completely new.
This means the only assured method of defeating the roid is too blow it up from the center as such new minerals could possibly deflect a laser beam.
No they are not completely new - just wind eroded rocks like exist on earth.
mars.jpl.nasa.gov/files/mep/ventifacts.pdf
We can't knock an airplane out of the sky with laser tech, but we're going to vaporize meteors? I got a bridge that you need desperately.
We can't knock down aircraft with a laser because of the atmosphere and the humidity (in various forms) that it carries. This is about 99% of the problem and the reason that the airborne laser program to shoot down missiles was abandoned. Since there is no atmosphere in space, 99% of the problem with the laser goes away. Hopefully it is replaced by a far smaller percentage of space/rocketry problems.
A mine field would make more sense. And be a hell of a lot cheaper.
It is clear that you have no concept of the vastness of space.
I sense physicists in need of a grant.
Bright green light over California. Last time for that color is when a Satellite broke up in space and reentered atmosphere. Think something got bumped up there by meteor or friendly target practicing and no one wants to say so.
A novel idea? A story from a book?
The only real idea that will work because it has been tested time and time again is to develop a program that will send teams to such a rock drill to a certain depth and then stick a nuke down the throat of the roid and blow it apart from the inside.
What Americ needs is this:
Take from the best natural gas drillings on the planet who have been drilling for years and train them to be astronaughts to function in a space environment.
From these select teams their children would be natural gas drillers first and then trained for such an event where they would need to go into space to destroy an asteroid.
This type of plan will work because it involves taking the asteroid or meteor out from the inside and not hitting it from the outside which a laser would be nothing more than shooting a BB at a freight train.
Or you can think of it like this.
Look at a suit of armor very hard to penetrate to get at the man underneat of it.
But if you give the man inside a cold then his armor is useless...
Or just place a firecracker in th palm of your hand which is the surface of the roid. Nothing happens. But when you close your hand around the firecracker....
Even better and safer to show try this.
Place a firecracker on the ground light and move away. What happens?
Now build a mound of dirt the size of a golf ball and place the firecracker inside of it, in this case the mound of dirt represents the asteroid and the firecracker the nuke.
Light and move away.
The firecracker will blow the dirt mound/asteroid apart and away from Earth so that the smaller pieces will merely burn up in the surface.
This plan will work because the process of fracking works to break apart the Earths surface just as drilling does to get to depth where the gas is located.
Hitting the roid from the outside will not work because the blast will do nothing more than compress the impact against the layers of the roid thus making the roid more resolute.
Yeah listen to the novel idea while the roid slams into Earth. Right.
Yes, all you have to do is spot it in time, fly out to an object traveling towards you at a speed of 10+ miles a second, reverse course to match its speed, land on it (near zero gravity), and plant your explosives. Piece of cake.... Yippie ki yo ki yay!
This is how the program would work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle
You'll notice the SEV to the right approaching the roid. The first vehicle would be used to send the drillers to the roid. The second and third SEV's would have drilling equipment attached to it that would be used to drill into the roid.
The explosive device would then be sent down the shaft and detonated thus blowing the roid up from the inside.
I saw that movie --- both of them! LOL
I take that back several SEV's would need to be fitted with the best water drilling rigs as possible since such equipment is small enough to mount of the side of the craft.
The SEV would drill along the fault lines of the roid just like coal miners or ore miners drill holes equal distances apart on the face of the wall of a cliff and then insert explosive charges into the holes and then blast the hell out of facing.
The blasts might even be large enough to alter the course of the roid so that it meets its fate in the Inferno's of Apollo or .....the sun.
Chew Chew Chew that iron bitch up!
Wow, read people read.. this is "space based".. some how, I doubt the aptmoshere will have a lot to do with degradation...
DESTAR ? DEathSTAR? oh goody!!.. the evil Stith lords shall soon vaporize us... And finally... we didnt see this one coming... we going to see the one that hits us a year ahead?
These guys are starting to sound like politicians telling us we dont spend enough money....
We already have the technology to land a vehicle on asteroids. After landing the craft using the thrust engine, rotate the engine 180 degrees and drive the vehicle directly into the asteroid, which will have the effect of pushing the dangerous asteroid off course. Simple. What's this vaporizing crap?
What's this vaporize noise? Carve them up and recover the valuable metals on them. we need to get out into space where we can enjoy all these natural resources.
How about if we fore-go our next aircraft carrier and build the DE-STAR instead? And, while we are at it, how about if we pull our troops out of places like S Korea, Germany, and Japan and dump that money into improving our infrastructure? And, maybe we could cut back on new submarines, planes, and tanks and toss that money at reducing the debt instead? Oh wait...I am going off into that crazy land of logic again. What was I thinking? Sorry, lets continue our path to oblivion. Who is betting on the meteor? Nukes?
If we discover an asteroid on a collison course with Earth it is not necessary to vaporize it (and it is an impractical solution to begin with). All that is necessary to is nudge the asteroid a couple of meters over a million km and if the nudging is done when the asteroid is around the Mars orbit it will miss us by thousands of miles.
If, as most of the dangerous asteroid have been so far, the asteroid is discovered only a couple of days/weeks from a collison, simply bend over and grab your butt, as there is no machine that will "vaporize" an asteroid quick enough to prevent damage.
Our best defense against these things is to find them now, not after they hit us.
A 100 kiloton nuclear device would have no problem disintegrating that 250 foot long space rock that just missed us last Friday. Whatever is left that could reenter the atmosphere would certainly burn up on reentry.
Of course, if it is accomplished within 22,000 miles we would certainly ruin a lot of the satellites we spent a lot of money putting up there.
HA, what a crock; next thing you know some Darth Vader type will be telling us that we can shoot down incoming missiles.
Isn't there even ONE congressman who will get his picture taken with an umbrella full of holes, to illustrate the folly of this????? What a waste of money.
Um, we CAN shoot down incoming missiles.
Congress will continue to fund these military programs so long as there is a military need to meet to the objectives charged with the defense of the United States and its Interests worldwide and so long as it continues to keep jobs in their back yards.