MEXICO: Plans to test a laser cannon onboard the International Space Station have been revealed.
It is hoped the experiment could pave the way for a high powered weapon capable of shooting down shoot down pieces of space debris in Earth orbit.
Powerful pulses from the laser would then push space junk into Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up.
The system would use a telescope already mounted on the station to find and target pieces of debris up to 62 miles (100km) away.
The paper, by researchers at the Riken research institute in Tokyo, was published in Acta Astronautica.
The EUSO telescope, which will be used to find debris, was originally planned to detect ultraviolet light emitted from air showers produced by ultra-high energy cosmic rays entering the atmosphere at night.
‘We realized,’ says Toshikazu Ebisuzaki, who led the effort, ‘that we could put it to another use. During twilight, thanks to EUSO’s wide field of view and powerful optics, we could adapt it to the new mission of detecting high-velocity debris in orbit near the ISS.’
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