The fact that they sell an attachment to convert a 1W laser into a “lightsaber”, and charge $100 for it, tells me all I need to know about their clientele.
That’s very impressive. It reminded me a bit of an odd little trivia snippet that struck me a while back:
(On shuttle mission STS-41-G) “The mission ran into a little unexpected and unwanted excitement on 10 October, when the Soviets, irritated at American “Star Wars” missile defense efforts, illuminated the orbiter with a laser, causing some equipment malfunctions and temporarily blinding the crew. The US government filed a diplomatic protest with the USSR.”
Supposedly an urban legend, though. Wikipedia pooh-poohs the claim and the Americans would probably have been very cross if it had really happened. Also, there might have been a nuclear war, which we would certainly know about today.
Later shuttle missions carried something called the Shuttle Laser Altimeter, which presumably would have been visible from Earth if your eyes could see near-infrared wavelengths. The report says that the laser beam had 40 millijoules of energy. That was on STS-72, in 1996. I learn that:
“Late in the spacewalk, (Winston) Scott climbed into foot restraints on the OAST-Flyer satellite platform for a thermal evaluation exercise. Endeavour was maneuvered to the coldest position possible, with its payload bay facing out toward deep space and allowing temperatures to dip to about 104 degrees below zero at the point where Scott was positioned to test the ability of his spacesuit to repel the bitter cold temperature of space.”
I wonder if they drew lots to see who got the job? I note that the pilot was Captain Brent W Jett, what a name. STS-51-G carried something called the High Precision Tracking Experiment (HPTE), which involved shining a laser at the Shuttle in order to track it. I realise that the Shuttle isn’t the ISS.
So, yes, obviously lasers can be seen from the ISS. According to this article the human vision system can perceive as few as five photos arriving within 100ms, so my hunch is that even the one-watt laser in that link is overkill.
I remember at least one techno-thriller of the 1980s had the Space Shuttle coming under laser attack - possibly The Third World War by General Sir John Hackett, or Eric Harry’s Arc Light. And there were lots of speculative plans for orbit solar power stations that would beam the energy to Earth with high-powered laser beams. No doubt you could imagine powering a spacecraft by shining an Earth-based laser onto its solar panels, for example.
This is true.
The idea that the inverse square law does not apply to lasers is a common misconception. The only difference between the far-field irradiance reduction of point sources versus lasers is a constant multiplier out in front. The reason people are fooled into thinking the law doesn’t apply is because this multiplier is a huge number in most cases. However, the intensity is nevertheless inversely proportional to the square of distance.
interesting cite.
A particularly simple and relatively inexpensive approach is to use a stack of razor blades with the sharp edges facing the beam, so that the spaces between the blades form very deep cavities from which little light escapes.
Would a Gilette Mach 5 work?
Great cite. You ask, GQ answers.
Unless a provocative YouTube video had circulated six weeks prior.
I’d like to point out that new Doper speakaman24 posted this link first (post 19), and revived the thread.
Credit where due, and all that.