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Is anyone working on a Star Trek style "deflector shield"?
by sanatgersappa 5y ago
Is anyone working on a Star Trek style "deflector shield"?
- choeger 5y agoIIRC, NASA was working on something like this. They wanted to enclose a space ship with a bubble of charged particles and then create a strong magnetic field with or through these particles. Anything metallic would have been deflected.
- elihu 5y agoSomething I imagine might work (though not really as a shield, but more of a preventative measure) would be to have a few objects in orbit with a very large surface area, so that orbital debris is likely to run into it and get knocked into an orbit that intersects the atmosphere. Let's say these objects have a thousand times more surface area than the objects you actually care about. This would mean that any random piece of debris is far more likely to hit the large debris target than the important satellites. Making something that can be hit by random objects at extreme velocities without generating even more debris sounds like a hard problem, though. Ice would be an interesting material because it sublimates, but it happens too quickly to be practically useful.
- fallingknife 5y agoThe problem is that at orbital velocity, the debris that hits the target will break off pieces of the target, and then you just have more debris.
- foxrider 5y agoI'm thinking something like a non-Newtonian gel in a foil wrap
- airhead969 5y agoSpace might not be warm enough for most STFs. Perhaps a graphene / aerogel composite in a gold foil winter holiday gift basket wrap.
- samstave 5y agohttps://www.sciencealert.com/boeing-has-patented-a-plasma-force-field-to-protect-against-shock-waves https://www.sciencealert.com/boeing-has-patented-a-plasma-fo... there are other patents as well