Earthlings fire off a signal to other inhabitants of the universe. Then one day, hundreds of alien spaceships show up, hovering over major cites, zapping them with laser weapons.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55487641/independenceday.0.jpg
)
Posted on 12/24/2022 3:44:32 AM PST by Ezekiel
An experiment to bounce a radio signal off an asteroid on Dec. 27 will serve as a test for probing a larger asteroid that in 2029 will pass closer to Earth than the many geostationary satellites that orbit our planet.
The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program research site in Gakona will transmit radio signals to asteroid 2010 XC15, which could be about 500 feet across. The University of New Mexico Long Wavelength Array near Socorro, New Mexico, and the Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array near Bishop, California, will receive the signal.
This will be the first use of HAARP to probe an asteroid.
“What’s new and what we are trying to do is probe asteroid interiors with long wavelength radars and radio telescopes from the ground,” said Mark Haynes, lead investigator on the project and a radar systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Longer wavelengths can penetrate the interior of an object much better than the radio wavelengths used for communication.”
Knowing more about an asteroid’s interior, especially of an asteroid large enough to cause major damage on Earth, is important for determining how to defend against it.
“If you know the distribution of mass, you can make an impactor more effective, because you’ll know where to hit the asteroid a little better,” Haynes said.
Many programs exist to quickly detect asteroids, determine their orbit and shape and image their surface, either with optical telescopes or the planetary radar of the Deep Space Network, NASA’s network of large and highly senstive radio antennas in California, Spain and Australia.
Those radar-imaging programs use signals of short wavelengths, which bounce off the surface and provide high-quality external images but don’t penetrate an object.
HAARP will transmit a continually chirping signal to asteroid 2010 XC15 at slightly above and below 9.6 megahertz (9.6 million times per second). The chirp will repeat at two-second intervals. Distance will be a challenge, Haynes said, because the asteroid will be twice as far from Earth as the moon is.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks operates HAARP under an agreement with the Air Force, which developed and owned HAARP but transferred the research instruments to UAF in August 2015.
The test on 2010 XC15 is yet another step toward the globally anticipated 2029 encounter with asteroid Apophis. It follows tests in January and October in which the moon was the target of a HAARP signal bounce.
Apophis was discovered in 2004 and will make its closest approach to Earth on April 13, 2029, when it comes within 20,000 miles. Geostationary satellites orbit Earth at about 23,000 miles. The asteroid, which NASA estimated to be about 1,100 feet across, was initially thought to pose a risk to Earth in 2068, but its orbit has since been better projected by researchers.
The test on 2010 XC15 and the 2029 Apophis encounter are of general interest to scientists who study near-Earth objects. But planetary defense is also a key research driver.
“The more time there is before a potential impact, the more options there are to try to deflect it,” Haynes said.
NASA says an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth’s atmosphere about once a year, creating a fireball and burning up before reaching the surface.
About every 2,000 years a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth. Those can cause a lot of damage. And as for wiping out civilization, NASA says an object large enough to do that strikes the planet once every few million years.
NASA first successfully redirected an asteroid on Sept. 26, when its Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or DART, collided with Dimorphos. That asteroid is an orbiting moonlet of the larger Didymos asteroid.
The DART collision altered the moonlet’s orbit time by 32 minutes.
The Dec. 27 test could reveal great potential for the use of asteroid sensing by long wavelength radio signals. Approximately 80 known near-Earth asteroids passed between the moon and Earth in 2019, most of them small and discovered near closest approach.
“If we can get the ground-based systems up and running, then that will give us a lot of chances to try to do interior sensing of these objects,” Haynes said.
The National Science Foundation is funding the work through its award to the Geophysical Institute for establishing the Subauroral Geophysical Observatory for Space Physics and Radio Science in Gakona
“HAARP is excited to partner with NASA and JPL to advance our knowledge of near-Earth objects,” said Jessica Matthews, HAARP’s program manager.
CONTACTS: • Ian J. O’Neill, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov
• Rod Boyce University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, 907-474-7185, rcboyce@alaska.edu
Angels dont play this HAARP
Is not HAARP part of Karl Rove’s weather machine ? s/
Yes.
Angels dont play this HAARP
There's always a first time!
They need to capture one of these small rocks into earth orbit. NASA could actually get a return on investment by mining it.
These are international projects.
(your link)
HAARP to bounce signal off asteroid in NASA experiment
https://www.gi.alaska.edu/news/haarp-bounce-signal-asteroid-nasa-experiment
https://www.gdscc.nasa.gov/
I’ve been to Goldstone near Barstow CA. The large dish was huge and the actual building structure rotates on hydraulic plates. Radio operators refer to rotating a beam antenna as “turning the house” That is appropriate at Goldstone. I even saw the Gold (plated) Bricks (for cooling of the components)
http://www.vla.nrao.edu/
Later I got the tour for the VLA (Very Large Array) site West of Socorro, NM on the plains of Saint Augustine. It is a series of huge fully rotatable dish antennas. There were only 3 operational when I met the engineer in charge, Bill Dumke. The dish antennas are on rail cars that are movable along the Y shaped rail system. It had a unique wave guide. It was a ferrite tube with copper wire spun inside. The Ferrite tube was 1/4 wavelength thick on the IF of the system. At the base of each dish was a cryogenic amplifier at the time. Later when quiet GASFETs were developed the super cooling was not necessary. The array now spans 22 miles.
There is also a VBLA system. Much larger effective diameter array.
Very Long Baseline Array
https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/vlba
https://greenbankobservatory.org/visit/
A neighbor of mine, when I lived in OK made the first attempt at using the Greenbank Dish antenna to do EME comms at 10GHZ. They had mechanical problems with the mount and lost their window of access for the test. A few weeks later a European group made the first 10GHZ Amateur radio contact.
Most if not all of these sites are under control of the National Science Foundation.
The equipment are not special purpose tools. They are adaptable in most cases to other specific needs.
Here is a well known one-of-a-kind, the Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico that was badly damaged when the feed horn system for the dish collapsed.
The Arecibo Observatory radio telescope in Puerto Rico has collapsed (Dec 01, 2020)
https://www.space.com/arecibo-radio-telescope-collapses
lol... man I havent heard anything from HAARP since the Clinton era!!
I should reread all of the Heinlein that I read as a teen.
“Later I got the tour for the VLA (Very Large Array) site West of Socorro, NM on the plains of Saint Augustine.”
I was there a few months back.
There might be some diplomatic problems with an orbiting asteroid. According to treaty, no country can own anything in space that it didn’t put up there themselves. And, of course, if an error is made nudging it into orbit, it might hit earth like a hundred nuclear bombs, depending on its size.
Yup. And if one nation, or group of nations, has control, dense chunks of it could be aimed at points on Earth that were politically undesirable. Even if it’s mined, the pieces need to be brought to ground, somehow.
Weaponizing space is also forbidden by treaty, not that it has stopped Russia in the past. Ukraine would be getting a healthy dose of kinetic bombardment today if they were able.
No. Don’t file the aliens on their astroid ships.
Don’t we have enough enemies already??
Earthlings fire off a signal to other inhabitants of the universe. Then one day, hundreds of alien spaceships show up, hovering over major cites, zapping them with laser weapons.
Asteroid receives homing signal changes flight path.
That scenario was used on The Expanse (on Prime video). The bad guys embedded pulse engines on the backside of large chunks of asteroids, pointed them towards earth...and fired up the engines. Several made it thru earth’s defenses, and BOOM!
Made nuclear weapons look like firecrackers.
Really...a very simple and effective idea.
Nah, all the really cool constructions projects will be in space!
Regards,
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.