Under a dark and tracked sky, the scientists of the National Laboratories of Sandia in New Mexico are deploying an unconventional tool for planetary defense: Heliostats.
“A heliosate is a very large motorized mirror, several meters on the edge that concentrates sunlight in a tower, like a giant magnifying glass,” Sandia scientist John Sandusky said to Space.com. “As the sun moves through the sky, the heliosate changes orientation to maintain the reflection of the fixed sun.
“Duration [the day]The sunlight concentrated by the many heliosteats boils water or melts salt to feed electric generators, “continues.” The generators collectively produce sinks of electricity megawatts for the electricity grid. “
But, as he pointed out, the Heliostats have no job at night. After sunset, these fixed mirrors remain inactive, covering ground acres but not fulfilling any purpose. “They simply sit there without using,” Sandusky said in a previous statement.
He proposes to reuse them to help find asteroids that can threaten the earth. “The Heliostats Work Just As Well in the Dark,” I explained to space.com, “concentrating starlight at night Arme’s Arme Army’s Army of Armythes to Arme Armyhes to Arme -Gaardes A Armyhes to Armyhes to Armythes to Army An army of an army of an army an army of an army an army an army an army or a solar panel.
The large number of heliosteats already available in the United States caused the idea of using them for the detection of asteroids at night. The faint objects, such as small asteroids near Earth or the big ones farther, require more light collection to detect. Instead of letting the thesis mirrors remain inactive, the plan is to put them in productive use with a minimum additional cost.
“[It’s a] Potentially cheap opportunity to use what we already have, “Sandusky said.” Initiall, will only be a new tool, an increase in the existing tools belt or astronomical observatories. But ultimately, you should climb less expensive to smaller or more distant asteroids. “
Heliostat hunting asteroids work differently from the images of the traditional telescope. Instead of creating an image mapping where the light lands in each sensor (or pixel), the heliosate method omits the images completely. It tracks how fast an object moves through the sky and converts that movement into a frequency signal, similar to how the radar detects speed.
“It’s like listening to a wind bell tower instead of listening to the wind of the wind,” Sandusky explained. “Heliostats sweep gently against stars, holding a constant rhythm during the night. The light flow of the stars produces a tone. The light of an asteroid that moves along the sweep produces a slightly different tone, because a slightly different position against the stars.
“The tone difference will generally be very small, less than one milihertz, [which is] Much finer than our ears could distinguish, “he continued.” But thanks to the extreme stability of GPS time, precision electronics resolves this small difference in the course of one night. The faster the asteroid, the greater the difference in tone. “
Sandusky has already spent summer nights testing his idea using one of the 212 Heliostats in the National Sandia Solar Test Installation in Albuquerque, he thought he has not yet tried to detect any asteroids. Until now, the heliosate has been slowly redirected to sweep from one place to another through the night sky, tracking the stars as a first step in the experiment.
“The current obstacle is funds to demonstrate the scale of a heliosate to many and to reprogram Heliostat drivers to sweep the stars instead of the horizon,” he said. “For the hunting of asteroids on a global scale, the various fields of Heliostats on Earth need synchronization with a common time standard, such as GPS. It must also be equipped with photodtiodos and other necessary optical and electronic devices.”
This will take time, but Sandusky has already presented its initial experimental results and computational simulations in the Society of Photoptical Instrumentation Engineers of the Image Conference, Sensing and Adaptive Optics of the Photoptical Instrumentation Society in San Diego. “Since this is an unconventional idea, the conference was a good option,” he said.
“The next step is the criticisms of the scientific and technical community, responding to the initial publication and identifying problems and limitations,” he continued. “New ideas benefit from critical feedback. In parallel, we see funds to equip heliosteats and make regular observations. Associations are needed to establish theoretical limits and improve the fidelity of the model.”
The next step, he said, could involve the use of heliosate to locate a known planet, an experiment that would help reveal the abilities and limitations of technology.
