PASADENA, Calif. — NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.
Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth.

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA and Vint Cerf, a vice president at Google Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., partnered 10 years ago to develop this software protocol. The DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet’s Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed.

The Interplanetary Internet must be robust to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space. Glitches can happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms and long communication delays occur. The delay in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half to 20 minutes at the speed of light.

Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, the DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection. In its design, if a destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded. Instead, each network node keeps the information as long as necessary until it can communicate safely with another node. This store-and-forward method, similar to basketball players safely passing the ball to the player nearest the basket means information does not get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. Eventually, the information is delivered to the end user.

“In space today, an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it,” said Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN Experiment Operations Center at JPL. “With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically.”

Engineers began a month-long series of DTN demonstrations in October. Data were transmitted using NASA’s Deep Space Network in demonstrations occurring twice a week. Engineers use NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft as a Mars data-relay orbiter. Epoxi is on a mission to encounter Comet Hartley 2 in two years. There are 10 nodes on this early interplanetary network. One is the Epoxi spacecraft itself and the other nine, which are on the ground at JPL, simulate Mars landers, orbiters and ground mission-operations centers.

This month-long experiment is the first in a series of planned demonstrations to qualify the technology for use on a variety of upcoming space missions. In the next round of testing, a NASA-wide demonstration using new DTN software loaded on board the International Space Station is scheduled to begin next summer.

In the next few years, the Interplanetary Internet could enable many new types of space missions. Complex missions involving multiple landed, mobile and orbiting spacecraft will be far easier to support through the use of the Interplanetary Internet. It also could ensure reliable communications for astronauts on the surface of the moon.

The Deep Impact Networking Experiment is sponsored by the Space Communications and Navigation Office in NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate in Washington. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and Discovery Program in Washington provided experimental access to the Epoxi spacecraft. The Epoxi mission team provided critical support throughout development and operations.

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_space_internet.html

The studing of UFOs and other unexplained phenomena from space should be a legitimate university subject, an American professor, Philip Haseley, has claimed.

By Andrew Hough

Last year there were almost 400 reported sightings to the Ministry of Defence of UFOs throughout Britain Photo: GETTY IMAGES

The New York anthropology professor said the subject should be part of the mainstream as a serious “area of study”.

The Niagara County Community College, a state university in New York, lecturer said due to the high amount of sightings every year, it should follow that students should be able to investigate phenomenon.

“(A sighting) happens to millions of people (around the world),” he said.

“It’s about time we looked into this as a worthy area of study.

“It’s important that the whole subject be brought out in the open and investigated.”

Prof Haseley, who is also head of the Western New York Mutual UFO Network, an organisation that is focused on UFO research, said there were up to 50 UFO sightings are reported every month across region.

He said the group investigated the sightings in a “scientific manner” using field investigation, radar, astronomy and meteorology.

“To say we are UFO believers basically implies we are taking this on faith, and that’s not the case. There’s plenty of evidence,” he said.

He dismissed the inevitable suggestions from skeptics that such study would be waste of time.

“We have to deal with skeptics like any other UFO organisation, and we are perfectly willing to be critiqued,” he told the Buffalo News in New York.

“We know people who think this is a nonsense subject. And we’ll refer you to voluminous literature and facts about UFOs.”

Last year there were almost 400 reported sightings to the Ministry of Defence of UFOs throughout Britain – a figure that had tripled from the previous year.

The so-called “X Files” reported to the MoD’s UFO desk was the “busiest” year on record.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/7584331/UFO-studies-should-be-legitimate-university-subject-claims-American-professor.html

By Jason Paur

Solar Impulse, a prototype of an airplane designed to fly around the world using only solar power, made its first real flight today. As the sun shone down on the Swiss countryside an aircraft powered by 12,000 solar cells flew for 87 minutes to an altitude of nearly 4,000 feet.

Solar Impulse program founder Bertrand Piccard called the inaugural flight a crucial step toward fulfilling his goal of circumnavigating the globe in such an unusual aircraft. In a statement from the Solar Impulse team, Piccard said he was relieved to have the first flight completed after seven years of hard work.

“This first mission was the most risky phase of the entire project,” Piccard said.  “Eighty-seven minutes of intense emotion after seven years of research, testing and perseverance. Never has an airplane as large and light ever flown before!”

The aircraft, known by its identifier HB-SIA, has a wingspan of a jumbo jet yet weighs the same as an average sedan. It made a “flea hop,” as the team called it, back in December when it lifted about three feet off the runway and flew less than a quarter mile. Today’s flight demonstrates that the airplane can not only fly, it can do so for an extended period at altitudes high enough for basic flight testing.

”This first flight was for me a very intense moment,” test pilot Markus Scherdel said after emerging from the solar airplane’s podlike cockpit.

During the flight, HB-SIA lifted off at just under 30 mph and a relatively short takeoff run. The four 10-horsepower electric motors are expected to deliver enough power for a cruise speed of around 40 to 45 mph. No, Solar Impulse won’t set any speed records.

Scherdel said the first flight was a familiarization flight for he and the team.

“The execution of these various maneuvers (turns, simulating the approach phase) was designed to get a feel for the aircraft and verify it’s controllable,” Scherdel said. Despite the plane’s immense size and light weight, the team found the plane met their expectations.

The wingspan of HB-SIA is 208 feet, that’s about 10 feet more than Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. But the airplane only weighs 3,500 pounds loaded for flight, about 499,000 pounds less than the 787.

After more flight testing with the sun powering HB-SIA, the Solar Impulse team hopes to perform night testing later this year. During those flights, the team will examine the viability of the schedule they plan to use for the around-the-world flight. The plan is to climb to higher altitudes during the day, and trade that altitude for airspeed, supplemented with battery power, to continue flying during the night. They expect to fly 36-hour shifts.

Piccard says the many years of work paid off today, but the work is only beginning.

“We still have a long way to go until the night flights and an even longer way before flying round the world, but today, thanks to the extraordinary work of an entire team, an essential step towards achieving our vision has been taken,” Piccard said in the statement from the team.

The around-the-world flight is scheduled to take place in 2012 with an updated version of HB-SIA. The flight will take place in several stages with pilots alternating regularly and a team on the ground keeping a careful eye on weather for the delicate aircraft.

Photos: Solar Impulse

Solar panels are visible on top of HB-SIA’s 208-foot wing.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/04/solar-airplane-completes-maiden-voyage/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29

By Doreen Walton
Science reporter, BBC News

It is 1,500 light-years from Earth but CoRoT-9b is the first temperate planet found known to be similar to those within our own Solar System.

The presence of CoRoT-9b was detected by a space mission designed to find planets we cannot see from the ground.

“It is the size of Jupiter and has an orbit similar to Mercury,” said lead researcher Dr Hans Deeg.

In the journal Nature, the scientists say it is the first planet of its type which can yield detailed information.

Eccentric orbits

More than 400 exoplanets, or planets outside the Solar System, have been discovered so far but Dr Deeg, who works at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in the Canary Islands, explained that the others have all been “exotic”.

“They are either extremely hot, being very close to the central star on short orbits, or they are on eccentric orbits, taking them close to and far from the central star, giving them extreme temperatures.”

CoRoT-9b has a temperate climate. “This is the first planet where it makes sense to apply the models developed for planets within our solar system,” said Dr Deeg.

The surface temperature is estimated to be between about -20 and 160 degrees Celsius.

Dr Deeg explained that although some of the exoplanets previously discovered were thought likely to be temperate it was not possible to confirm that or to find out much information about them.

The planet was discovered by an international team of 60 astronomers and identified using the “transit” method.

During its orbit of 95 days it passes in front of its central star, or transits, for about eight hours. “The transit method enables us to obtain much more information about it,” explained Dr Deeg.

“We expect this to be a reference object for the next decade.

“We can derive its temperature as we know the distance to the central star and the type of central star it is.”

A blue planet?

CoRoT-9b was spotted by the CoRoT satellite, which is a mission led by the French space agency, Centre National d’Études Spatiales. Its presence was then confirmed by observations from several telescopes from the European Southern Observatory, in Tenerife and at other sites.

“An analysis of the data from the satellite gives us the size and the data from the ground gives us the mass,” explained Dr Deeg.

“We don’t know the colour. It’s likely that it has high atmosphere water clouds which might make it blue but that depends on the mixture of gases which we really do not know,” he added.

The scientists say the discovery of the planet shows that the development history of our Solar System has been repeated around other stars.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8572760.stm

Enhancements

• Pinch-to-zoom is now available when using the browser, Gallery, and Google Maps.
• New Weather and News application plus widget.
  • The Weather and News app pulls the information you want from the
    Web and brings it to your fingertips. You get weekly and hourly
    weather forecasts based on your location, and news headlines.
• New support for voice-to-text entry.
  • Whenever a text-entry box appears, simply tap the microphone icon on the virtual keyboard and speak.
• New Gallery application with 3D layout. View and share photos taken with your phone and images from your online Picasa Web albums.
• Live Wallpapers offer richer animated, interactive backgrounds on the
  home screen. Access them with a long press anywhere on the home screen. Tap Wallpapers, then Live Wallpapers.

Improvements

• Free Yahoo!® Mail is now supported—simply sign in with your Yahoo! email address and password.
• Google Maps update
  • Personalized suggestions and synchronized starring with
    desktop maps.google.com.
    • Starred items are stored and synced automatically between Google
      Maps on your device and maps.google.com on your computer, making it easy to search for places you’ve searched for before.
  • New night mode in Google Maps Navigation automatically changes the screen at night for easier viewing.
• Improved pattern-lock functionality.
• Improved handset audio when disconnecting a wired headset.
• Email accounts no longer need to be re-entered after an over-the-air update.

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/03/16/verizon-posts-motorola-droid-2-1-update-details/

Mini-SAR map of the Circular Polarization Ratio (CPR) of the north pole of the Moon. Fresh, “normal” craters (red circles) show high values of CPR inside and outside their rims. This is consistent with the distribution of rocks and ejected blocks around fresh impact features, indicating that the high CPR here is surface scattering. The “anomalous” craters (green circles) have high CPR within, but not outside their rims. Their interiors are also in permanent sun shadow. These relations are consistent with the high CPR in this case being caused by water ice, which is only stable in the polar dark cold traps. We estimate over 600 million cubic meters (1 cubic meter = 1 metric ton) of water in these features.

Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon’s north pole. NASA’s Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it’s estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.

The Mini-SAR has imaged many of the permanently shadowed regions that exist at both poles of the Moons. These dark areas are extremely cold and it has been hypothesized that volatile material, including water ice, could be present in quantity here.  The main science object of the Mini-SAR experiment is to map and characterize any deposits that exist.

Mini-SAR is a lightweight (less than 10 kg) imaging radar.  It uses the polarization properties of reflected radio waves to characterize surface properties.  Mini-SAR sends pulses of radar that are left-circular polarized.  Typical planetary surfaces reverse the polarization during the reflection of radio waves, so that normal echoes from Mini-SAR are right circular polarized.  The ratio of received power in the same sense transmitted (left circular) to the opposite sense (right circular) is called the circular polarization ratio (CPR).  Most of the Moon has low CPR, meaning that the reversal of polarization is the norm, but some targets have high CPR.  These include very rough, fresh surfaces (such as a young, fresh crater) and ice, which is transparent to radio energy and multiply scatters the pulses, leading to an enhancement in same sense reflections and hence, high CPR.  CPR is not uniquely diagnostic of either roughness or ice; the science team must take into account the environment of the occurrences of high CPR signal to interpret its cause.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/multimedia/feature_ice_like_deposits.html

In a bid to discover the secrets of the universe, scientists have restarted the world’s most powerful atom smasher, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Sunday.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 16.8 mile underground tunnel located on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, produced its first beam of 2010 at 4:10 CET (0310 GMT). “The LHC is on its way again,” said CERN in a tweet on its website.

The 5.6 billion dollar LHC was shut down in December to get it ready for the new project. In the weeks before the shutdown, the collider achieved over a million particle collisions and accelerated proton beams to unfathomable energy levels, according to CERN.

The scientists were able to produce a world record energy level of 2.36 teraelectronvolts (TeV). But they are now hoping to reach 7.0 TeV to try to recreate conditions around the time of the Big Bang, and run those levels for up to 24 months. Eventually, CERN wants to be able to reach 14 TeV, but only after another long shutdown scheduled for late 2011.

CERN spent $40 million to repair and improve the LHC over 14 months before it made a successful 4 week run in November and December of last year. The latest shutdown was used to improve electrical connections and other parts of the machine. Preliminary testing of the machine is being done to ready it for operation at higher levels.

After the current vigilant restart, CERN will increase the energy output little by little, reaching levels 3.5 times greater than the levels reached in Chicago. After modifications are completed, scientists will try for 7 TeV. But for the foreseeable future — the next 18 – 24 months — they intend to keep it at 3.5 TeV.

“There’s a long way to go between getting the first bunches of protons to go around and actually getting the machine to its top working levels,” a spokesman for CERN said. “It’s a lot like having designed a Formula One racing car. The first time you send it out, the guy doesn’t go round the circuit as fast as he can. You have to learn about the controls, how the car handles.”

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1829603/scientists_restart_worlds_most_powerful_atom_smasher/

Mercedes-Benz is introducing a “research vehicle,” er, concept at the Geneva Motor Show next month that combines hydrogen fuel cells with plug-in hybrid.

That means the F800 Style can travel for 18 miles on electric power alone after being plugged in overnight — and when it runs out of juice it can cruise for another 375 miles on hydrogen. The result: no emissions.

Since it’s a concept and an automaker can can hog-wild — not that staid Mercedes would ever call it that — the F800 has cool sliding rear doors and a sparse interior.

“We are dedicated to reconciling our responsibility for the environment with practical customer utility in a fascinating automobile,” says Thomas Weber, the Daimler Board of Management member responsible for R&D.

The plug-in hybrid powerplant pairs big batteries with a V-6 engine capable of 300 horsepower, or 409 horsepower when the electric motors kick in.

For driving on fuel-cell power, Mercedes-Benz engineers somehow found a way to tuck that componant under the hood with an electric motor near the rear axle nd four hydrogen tanks, two of which are between the passengers.

by Alan Boyle

A Toyota Scion converted to all-electric power is plugged into California’s electrical
grid during a demonstration at the annual meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

Someday, someone will pay you to hook your car into the electrical grid. It’s one of those almost-a-sure-thing business opportunities enabled by the expected rise of plug-in vehicles. But will the payoff be worth the cost? That’s where the calculations get a little complicated.

Experts on the future of the electrical grid and plug-in electric cars came together this week in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to discuss their common interests.
The concept of moving power back and forth between a smarter grid and more capable electric cars, known as vehicle-to-grid or V2G, is a “perfect bridge technology” for two complementary energy frontiers, said Jasna Tomic, new-fuels project manager for Calstart, a nonprofit energy research center headquartered in California.

It’s a concept that utilities are willing to shell out money to support, said Ken Huber, senior technology and education principal at Pennsylvania-based PJM Interconnection.

PJM coordinates power transmission for a region that takes in all or part of 13 states and the District of Columbia. One of the big challenges for companies like PJM is to keep the load on the regional grids as stable as possible. Too much of a load is bad, potentially leading to brownouts. Too little of a load can also be bad, especially as electric utilities move toward renewable sources such as wind and solar energy.

To keep its regional grid stable, PJM needs to have battery storage capability equal to 1 percent of its peak load. Since PJM’s peak is around 100,000 megawatts, “we have 1,000 megawatts moving up and down,” Huber explained.

So here’s where your future electric car enters the picture: PJM is currently paying battery providers somewhere around $25 to $35 per megawatt-hour to have that electrical storage available. If you have a plugged-in car just sitting idle, PJM would love to have a system that could take a little bit of the power out of your car battery during peak times, and send it back out to your battery during off-peak hours.

“It has a very, very high value to the grid,” Huber said.

How much is it worth?
Exactly how much value? That’s the point of a pilot project operated by a group called the MAGIC Consortium. The consortium started small, connecting just a few cars from the University of Delaware’s campus fleet. The cars were Toyota Scions that were converted into all-electric “eBoxes” using AC Propulsion’s kit.

The conversion also required the addition of a power control box that could transmit and receive data about the battery’s state as well as the electric company’s power requirements over a secure Internet connection. After all, the last thing you want is to have somebody hack into your car.

Three or four cars are hardly worth developing a system for, but for the University of Delaware test, the AES power company served as an aggregator for battery capacity. The payment to the customer – in this case, the University of Delaware – was based on how much capacity the cars’ batteries held (19 kilowatt-hours), and how long the car was plugged in (on average, 21.5 hours a day).

The payments typically amounted to $300 per month per car, said Willett Kempton, senior policy scientist at the University of Delaware’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy.

Not ready for prime time
If you consider merely the $500 cost of adding the control box and software, that’s a good deal. But if you factor in the cost of converting the car into a plug-in vehicle – an expense that can range into tens of thousands of dollars – you definitely wouldn’t do it just for the power company’s payout.

“Right now, because batteries are expensive, the value is less than the cost,” Kempton acknowledged.

You’d have to consider other benefits – for example, the fact that you could charge up your eBox for a 150-mile trip for just a couple of dollars, which is less than the price for a gallon of gasoline.

AP file: The Chevy Volt goes on display at the Washington Auto Show.

Although converted plug-ins such as AC Propulsion’s eBox are available now, most people will probably wait to make their plug-in purchase until they get a look at mass-market vehicles such as the Chevy Volt (a gas-electric hybrid) and the Nissan Leaf (which is all-electric). Both those models should be available starting late this year.

It’s too early to judge just how much impact plug-in cars will have, particularly when it comes to vehicle-to-grid technology. But if a million electric vehicles hit the streets in the next five years, as President Barack Obama has suggested, something will have to be done to accommodate that extra load on the grid, Huber said. That could take the form of demand-sensitive pricing for electricity – which would make V2G more attractive.

“I don’t believe we’re going to be in the situation we’re in today for very much longer,” Huber said.

Boosting the batteries
Better battery packs will be key to the success of plug-in vehicles, said Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt. General Motors has developed a new breed of 16-kilowatt-hour batteries based on lithium-manganese chemistry – as well as a cooling and heating system to keep those batteries at a stable temperature.

“We call the battery the ‘fifth passenger’ sometimes, because we take such good care of it,” Posawatz told me.

As more plug-ins are sold, more and more batteries will be available to store and eventually use the energy that’s generated by solar and wind. “We’re going to make this asset available to plug in all the time to collect the energy created by this green technology,” Posawatz said.

GM is working on a number of initiatives for smart charging and automatic software upgrades, including technologies that take advantage of the automaker’s OnStar service. But it will be a while before vehicle-to-grid technology is built into the Volt, Posawatz said. “Two-way energy transfer is several years out,” he told me.

It’s more likely that car owners will use their own “smarts,” once cars like the Volt have been around for a while. Some might sign up for a V2G upgrade from the utility, like the system pioneered by the MAGIC Consortium. Others might install solar panels at home and use their plugged-in car as a storage device for home-brewed electricity.

In the long run, car owners might even save their old plug-in batteries to store more power at home. “We believe the battery will have a life outside the car,” Posawatz said.

But pretty much everyone agrees that the most important milestone on the road to plug-in paradise will be cheaper batteries. Right now, the batteries for plug-in cars cost $1,000 or more per kilowatt-hour – which makes the plug-ins much more expensive than their petroleum-fueled counterparts. The battery cost is so significant that the National Research Council concluded it would take decades for the benefits of plug-ins to outweigh the costs.

“That’s the biggest challenge,” Posawatz acknowledged. “How can we quickly move down the cost curve and get the technological advances going? Certainly the automotive industry does not move as quickly as the telecommunications industry. … Can we make that kind of progress on a shorter time scale?”

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2010/02/19/2206517.aspx

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 February 2010 23.39 GMT

An infrared image released by the US department of defense shows the Missile Defense Agency’s airborne laser destroying its target. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The US this week achieved a goal that has eluded it since Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program by knocking out a ballistic missile using a high-powered laser beam mounted on a plane.

The successful test was carried out yesterday in California, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said, making real what had previously been confined to the realms of science fiction.

The plane uses a combination of lasers to lock on to the missile and track its trajectory, and then bring it down with a ­single shot fired from the nose turret, all in less than 12 seconds.

According to analysts, the breakthrough could have an impact on the North Korean and Iranian missile programs, forcing them to develop faster missiles and adopt measures to counter the laser beams.

The MDA said today: “The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometers, and at a low cost per intercept attempt compared to current technologies.”

Work on the laser weapons system has been under way in earnest for at least a decade, at a cost of more than $1bn. In the past, laser beams have been used successfully against stationary targets from stationary platforms, but in this test the beam was directed from a plane against a moving target, a much more challenging feat.

However, some scientists and military analysts expressed skepticism about its long-term viability, saying that other such projects that had been hailed as revolutionary did not work when confronted by all the problems thrown up by war.

Michael Elleman, a senior fellow for missile research in the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, traced a direct line from the controversial program set out by Reagan three decades ago that was dubbed Star Wars, which envisaged lasers based in outer space intercepting missiles. “Reagan had a grand vision but did not know what the architecture would look like. They were looking more at space-based laser technology. The laser [in the latest test] is not necessarily what Reagan envisaged but it fits inside the grander scheme of what he wanted to achieve.”

Elleman said the laser could force North Korea, whose Unha missile is slow, to look at accelerated missiles and that Iran was already doing this.

The MDA said the test was carried out at Point Mugu’s Naval Air Warfare Center near Ventura.

“The Missile Defense Agency demonstrated the potential use of directed energy to defend against ballistic missiles when the Airborne Laser Test-bed (ALTB) successfully destroyed a boosting ballistic missile,” the agency said.

The system is being developed by ­Boeing, which uses the airframe of a modified 747 jumbo, and the MDA. Aerospace and defense contractor Northrop Grumman supplies the higher-energy laser, while Lockheed Martin is developing the beam and fire control systems.

“This was the first directed energy lethal intercept demonstration against a liquid-fuel boosting ballistic missile target from an airborne platform,” the agency added.

The system successfully intercepted a missile in August last year but did not bring it down.

Last year the defense secretary, Robert Gates, decided that the program should be scaled back, keeping research to a single plane, because of skepticism about how practical it would be.

John Pike, a defense analyst and founder of Virginia-based Global Security, said he doubted the test would change Gates’s view. “Gates seemed to believe that there was no prospect of the plane engaging targets at ranges of several hundred kilometers, and that engagements at ranges of less than 100 kilometers were not militarily interesting,” he said.

The MDA statement did not specify what the range was during the test.

Ivan Oelrich, a physicist and vice-president for strategic security programs at the Federation of American Scientists, said: “What would be interesting would be how far away it [the missile] is.” He said that to be useful, the laser would have to be able to shoot down missiles from at least 100 miles. It would also be expensive to keep one or more planes on stations waiting for a missile.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/feb/12/star-wars-laser-ballistic-missile