this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Privacy
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Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?
Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.
The latter - targeting from ground. While that sounds daunting, it's already possible. Sats can aim data laser beams at other sats at even higher relative speeds.
Beam coherence is the only problem with targeting sats from the ground. But remember, these sats come with big telescopes to collect as much light as they can. It may not take a lot of radiative flux to overload their sensors. I wonder how much it will take to completely fry them.
Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.
Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.
You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.
Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.
I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth... you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to... what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV
EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.
Point is... this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.
Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.
If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.