Saturday, December 22, 2007

 

Ridiculously large expanding antenna

Just some idea to throw out there for any future scientists or researchers that may ever happen upon this information... Here's a discription for a ridiculously large expanding antenna:

Make panels out of a reflective, lightweight, and highly flexible material. Something like mylar, if not actually mylar. Each panel would represent a small section of a parabolic dish reflector that could be in a standard orbit, or maybe even a lagrange point. These panels would be collapsed after construction and until their placement in orbit. Once the panels reach their destination they would be expanded back to the original form and then put into place and attached to form the dish. Expansion of the panels would involve inflatable tubes or ridges in their construction. Not much gas would be needed to provide the inflation pressure, since space is nearly a vacuum. (This type of technology is already in use by some orbiting satellites by the way, but I've got an extra feature added - which is immediately next.) The design of these panels would also anticipate the possible deformation caused by gas leak out in the future. Thus the solution to this would be to include capsules along the ridges that contain parts of a self reacting epoxy polymer. Sometime just before the panel reaches the full expansion size, the capsules are designed to break. Thus coating the inside of the inflatable ridge structures with an epoxy. That way they maintain ridigity even without the gas and hold taut the reflective membrane. It may be possible that attachment of the panels to each other could use the same epoxy technology.

But the idea is that using such structures, you could put an automated system that could assemble a radio dish that easily dwarfs the Aricebo one. Even better yet, imagine the resolving power that an array of these things could produce if ever coordinated somehow.

 

Another random thought - on a mostly unread blog.

After reading some random stuff, this is how I think relations between anything in space could be described:

(X, Y, Z), t , (Xi, Yi, Zi), ti

Thus there are the normally observable portions of space X, Y, Z, definable at time t. But then there are the "imaginary" space components Xi, Yi, Zi and the ti for an imaginary time. The "i" component of these elements is more or less the same "i" seen in math using complex numbers. If you were to square their value, you'd see a negative real number.

I almost suspect that gravity would be the resultant of an imaginary square, since it is only observable as an attractive force. There might not be any "anti-gravity", but perhaps knowing how the relation of an imaginary space component ties into a standard one might allow you to zero out gravity or produce a strong attractor. (Still the net effect of a combined zeroing the influence of a natural attractor and production of an artificial accelerating force might look like antigravity in a practical sense.) Also this might be interesting for quantum particles that blink in and out of real space - squares of imaginary stuff would blink into negative components of real space. (Not necessarily antimatter, but it might be left handed where normally such things are right handed, etc.) Gets a little too funky for me to think of in detail, but that scratches the surface at least.

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