#Optical Reflector

[haolilaiguangdian]

Optical Reflector

The working principle of a reflector is based on the law of reflection, where the incident light, reflected light, and normal line in the same plane, and the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. These reflector surfaces undergo special treatment, allowing light to reflect along predetermined paths, thereby changing the direction of light propagation.

The main parameters of reflectors include reflectance, surface roughness, shape, and size. Reflectance determines the efficiency of reflection for reflectors, while surface roughness affects the quality of reflected light. The shape and size of reflectors determine their operating mode and application range.

Company Name:Changzhou Haolilai Photo-Electricity Scientific and Technical Co., Ltd. Web:https://www.cnhll.com/product/optical-flat-mirror/optical-reflector/ ADD:No.10 wangcai road, Luoxi town,Xinbei district, Changzhou,Jiangsu, China. Phone:86-519-83200018 Email:sales@cnhll.com Profile:As a High-Tech enterprise in Jiangsu province, HLL boasts a talented team with intensive experience and professional technology. HLL has established Jiangsu Precision Optical Lens Engineering Technology Center and Jiangsu Enterprise Technology Research Center and obtained multiple patents for inventions, multiple utility model patents and multiple Jiangsu High New Tech Products.

[kaontic]

Hmm, somethin’ about this art style looks familiar…

[brandwhorestarscream]

Got one about the ask about personalised sexy content on Cybertron: I wanted to share something that came to mind :D

Where would Soundwave fit in this since he's a communications officer most of the time?

hc that Soundwave has the Decepticon base intranet under his monitoring, like a moderator of sorts. He knows about the "hidden" channel perused by the other cons (names all anonymised as well) to share past saved content. He maybe ponders taking it down a few times at first, but lets it stay since he'd be wasting energy to repeat the process countless times. He infiltrates the channel as a lurker. The content shared does spring forth a few fond memories (he finds some of his old likes being shared there), he's also being introduced to other creators and he pretty much expands his tastes.

Some point later on, Soundwave finds out the following:

A portion of the Decepticon soldiers are actively making new content centred around the sexy pinups etc and sharing it within that very channel. There's expected discussion here and there about the content.

The one who made the channel in the first place has made splinter channels for specific-themed content. Well everybody is broke so stuff goes online for free.

High Command is unknowingly made the subjects of such content. Soundwave doesn't want to admit, their mechs are good at taking things out of context. And quite a few have good optics for photography as made clear by their capture's composition and timing (OP usually gives a caption describing the subject matter or how they got the shot)

Soundwave finds out about the cross-faction section: it is a lot bigger than he thought and also carries more discussion about where those former creators are now. A handful of mechs are also sharing plans to capture newer content featuring the Autobots - Soundwave makes a mental note to keep a close optic on them.

Soundwave suspects Reflector might have been dragged along one too many times to get some of the photos taken.

-----------

...and that's how far I got along with it!

I am thinking some of the bots and cons we all know may have some kind of experience with the OF scene before the war. It just so happens each faction later on has maybe at most, a handful of the content creators still online. How do you think each faction handles knowing their fellow bot who made the very material they overload to is fighting alongside them? On the flipside, how about discovering their favourite creator is now on the opposing faction?

Oooh this is fun. To answer your questions:

1. I don't think there's ever gonna be a situation where more than 2 or 3 people are in the same room as one of their old favorite adult stars. Its just not very statistically likely. Individual rxns depend on the person themselves, but most range from "respectfully pretending not to know" and "flustered if they think about it too much but trying to play it cool and not bring it up." They're not actively doing sex work these days so it'd be rude or weird to bring it up unless they're close friends

2. Favorite creator being on the opposing faction just means they get some fresh new cross-faction fantasies to get off to. Good for them, I say

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA's Deep Space Network starts new dish, marks 60 years in Australia

NASA has broken ground on construction of a new 34 metre radio antenna dish at its Canberra, deep space communications network facility at Tidbinbilla.

Canberra joined the global network in 1965 and operates four radio antennas.

Now, preparations have begun on its fifth as NASA works to increase the network's capacity.

NASA's Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia celebrated its 60th anniversary on March 19 while also breaking ground on a new radio antenna. The pair of achievements are major milestones for the network, which communicates with spacecraft all over the solar system using giant dish antennas located at three complexes around the globe.

Canberra's newest addition, Deep Space Station 33, will be a 112-foot-wide (34-meter-wide) multifrequency beam-waveguide antenna. Buried mostly below ground, a massive concrete pedestal will house cutting-edge electronics and receivers in a climate-controlled room and provide a sturdy base for the reflector dish, which will rotate during operations on a steel platform called an alidade.

"As we look back on 60 years of incredible accomplishments at Canberra, the groundbreaking of a new antenna is a symbol for the next 60 years of scientific discovery," said Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator of NASA's SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Building cutting-edge antennas is also a symbol of how the Deep Space Network embraces new technologies to enable the exploration of a growing fleet of space missions."

When it goes online in 2029, the new Canberra dish will be the last of six parabolic dishes constructed under NASA's Deep Space Network Aperture Enhancement Program, which is helping to support current and future spacecraft and the increased volume of data they provide. The network's Madrid facility welcomed a new dish in 2022, and the Goldstone, California, facility is putting the finishing touches on a new antenna.

Canberra's role

The Deep Space Network was officially founded on Dec. 24, 1963, when NASA's early ground stations, including Goldstone, were connected to the new network control center at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Called the Space Flight Operations Facility, that building remains the center through which data from the three global complexes flows.

The Madrid facility joined in 1964, and Canberra went online in 1965, going on to help support hundreds of missions, including the Apollo moon landings.

"Canberra has played a crucial part in tracking, communicating, and collecting data from some of the most momentous missions in space history," said Kevin Ferguson, director of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. "As the network continues to advance and grow, Canberra will continue to play a key role in supporting humanity's exploration of the cosmos."

By being spaced equidistant from one another around the globe, the complexes can provide continual coverage of spacecraft, no matter where they are in the solar system as Earth rotates.

There is an exception, however: Due to Canberra's location in the Southern Hemisphere, it is the only one that can send commands to and receive data from Voyager 2 as it heads south almost 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) through interstellar space. More than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, Voyager 1 sends its data down to the Madrid and Goldstone complexes, but it, too, can only receive commands via Canberra.

New technologies

In addition to constructing more antennas like Canberra's Deep Space Station 33, NASA is looking to the future by also experimenting with laser, or optical, communications to enable significantly more data to flow to and from Earth. The Deep Space Network currently relies on radio frequencies to communicate, but laser operates at a higher frequency, allowing more data to be transmitted.

As part of that effort, NASA is flying the laser-based Deep Space Optical Communications experiment with the agency's Psyche mission. Since the October 2023 launch, it has demonstrated high data rates over record-breaking distances and downlinked ultra-high definition streaming video from deep space.

"These new technologies have the potential to boost the science and exploration returns of missions traveling throughout the solar system," said Amy Smith, deputy project manager for the Deep Space Network at JPL, which manages the network.

"Laser and radio communications could even be combined to build hybrid antennas, or dishes that can communicate using both radio and optical frequencies at the same time. That could be a game-changer for NASA."

TOP IMAGE: The radio antennas of NASA’s Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex are located near the Australian capital. It’s one of three Deep Space Network facilities around the world that keep the agency in contact with dozens of space missions Credit: NASA

CENTRE IMAGE: Three eye-catching posters featuring the larger 230-foot (70-meter) antennas located at the three Deep Space Network complexes around the world. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

LOWER IMAGE: Located at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve near the Australian capital city, the Canberra complex joined the Deep Space Network on March 19, 1965, with one 85-foot-wide (26-meter-wide) radio antenna. The dish, called Deep Space Station 42, was decommissioned in 2000. This photograph shows the facility in 1965. Credit: NASA

[squidthesquidd]

AYO FAN CONTINUITY IM SO EXCITED

I love ratchet. Question, do the green optics have anything to do with SynthEn, or was ratchet born with it?

also, I'd love to hear about the world building of the fan continuity!!! How did the bots get to earth, and who else is there besides Ratchet, Arcee, and Optimus?

OMG HAIIII :3 aaaaand to answer the eye question: Optics in this universe can be just about any color! the only limitation is that light blue is autobot exclusive, and red is decepticon exclusive! Ratchets eyes aren’t green due to synthen, he’s just like that, BUT the green is a reference to that because i love tfp :333

aaaand so far the only bots ive actually drawn are optimus, elita, bumblebee, cliffjumper, megatron, arcee, blitzwing, prowl, aaand ratchet. but there are many others! so far ive planned for starscream, thundercracker, skywarp, sounwave and the cassettes, shockwave, wheeljack, tarantulas, the dinobots, jazz, ultra magnus, skyfire, ironhide, mirage, hound, trailbreaker, the reflector trio, sideswipe, astrotrain, knockout, breakdown, black arachnia, hot rod, cyclonus, tailgate, the constructicons, blurr, insecticons, blaster, aaaaand more if i come up with good ideas for them

the autobots got to the planet in a similar way to g1! but they weren’t in a 4 million hear coma lol. their ship crashed in nevada (cus tfp had the right idea ngl) and then they decided to bury it so it wouldn’t be discovered. the decepticons followed them in their own ship but lost track of them upon entering the atmosphere, so now they circle the earth (once again tfp style)

[spilled-energon]

It was supposed to be a simple in and out job. Soundwave sent Rumble and Frenzy- as well as a bot by the name of Reflector for backup- behind enemy lines to gather intel. All they had to do was sneak into the Autobot base while Soundwave and his troops drew the enemy out, allowing his deployers to download any files they could get their servos wrong.

It didn't end how it was supposed to.

Laserbeak was soaring high above the battle, allowing Soundwave a bird's-eye view, while Ravage weaved inbetween his pedes as he fought back against any approaching Autobots. Soundwave danced backwards with the ease of a skilled gladiator, helm tilting out of the way of the Autobot's sword, only to disarm the mech and run him through with his own weapon. Ravage held no fear of being stepped on by his host, years of experience fighting alongside Soundwave making the movements second nature as he dodged, weaved, and bit at any legs that came too close.

Where there had previously been anticipation and the eagerness to complete the battle over the bond with his symbiotes, there was suddenly an all encompassing fear. Thick, overwhelming, and horribly terrifying.

Soundwave didn't even hear the explosion. All he felt was the sudden snap and resulting shatter over the bond. With it, came an immense amount of pain- more than Soundwave had ever experienced prior. Laserbeak fell from the sky, Ravage collapsed at his pedes, and Soundwave's own legs threatened to buckle. The sheer magnitude of the sudden loss was enough to render both present deployers unconscious.

Rumble and Frenzy were gone. Their tethers to his spark had been brutally ripped from his very life force, leaving behind a gushing, aching hole.

Something tore through the metal of his shoulder, energon exploding from the wound. Soundwave stumbled forward, but managed to keep his balance. Every ounce of his frame shook with emotions he couldn't even begin to comprehend. The urge to just simply collapse into a heap was beyond tempting, but then he felt his pede brush against the unconscious feline beneath him.

Blinding rage filled him. Nobody touched his deployers. Soundwave lunged forward, data cables ripping from their casings and stabbing through three approaching Autobots with a sickening crunch. The spark of one was yanked out in a burst of gore, then promptly detonated with a quick use of his Outlier ability. It exploded, taking its owner, and the other two Autobots, with it. Another bot approached, which Soundwave immediately slammed into with all of his weight. They toppled backwards, pedes slipping on spilled energon and tripping over the husk of a fallen comrade. Without another thought, Soundwave slammed his pede down into their helm, revelling in the gruesome crack and resulting squealch.

By the time Autobots stopped approaching him, there was a graveyard of filth surrounding him. Soundwave, with the gentleness of a parent and their child, lifted Ravage and held him close to his chest. He staggered forward, ignoring how his legs wavered with every step. A sob caught in his throat, but his Vow made quick work of quieting it. He picked his way over to Laserbeak's unconscious form, then carefully scooped her up as well. With the last two remaining deployers safely within his grasp, Soundwave finally broke.

He collapsed to his knees, frame shaking so violently that it hurt. His lack of typical optics meant that he couldn't cry, but his frame reacted as though he was. Chest heaving, throat tight, vents gasping. His spark burned in a way he had never experienced before. Empty, broken, hurt, lost.

It wasn't until Megatron finally found him at least an hour later that he was collected, gently being coaxed away from the carnage of the battlefield.

They were gone. Truly, absolutely, completely gone.

Numbed by the cruel world around him, Soundwave could only hope that Rumble and Frenzy had received a quick and painless death.

[sngl-led-auto-lights]

Why don't car manufacturers use polarized glass for their windscreens and their headlights? One 90° turned relative to the other. Wouldn't that avoid getting blinded by the headlights of cars coming from the opposite direction?

The idea of using polarized windshields and headlights to reduce glare is intriguing, but several technical, practical, and safety challenges make it unfeasible for widespread automotive use. Here's a breakdown of why this concept hasn't been adopted:

​​1. Polarization Mechanics & Limitations​​ • Theory: If headlights emit vertically polarized light and windshields are horizontally polarized, the windshield would block glare from oncoming vehicles.

• Reality:

• Light Scattering: Headlights need to illuminate the road, which relies on light scattering. Polarized light scatters less effectively, reducing visibility of road surfaces, signs, and obstacles.

• Angular Sensitivity: Polarization effectiveness depends on alignment. On curved roads or hills, the 90° alignment between cars breaks down, causing glare to "leak" through.

​​2. Compromised Visibility for Drivers​​ • Non-Polarized Light Sources: Traffic signals, brake lights, and streetlights emit unpolarized light. A polarized windshield would block critical light from these sources.

• Passenger Discomfort: Polarized windshields could distort or dim screens (e.g., GPS, infotainment) and heads-up displays (HUDs), which often rely on specific light orientations.

​​3. Technical Challenges​​ • Durability: Polarized films degrade over time due to UV exposure, temperature swings, and physical wear, requiring frequent replacement.

• Manufacturing Complexity: Aligning polarization angles across millions of vehicles (and replacement parts) would demand precision incompatible with mass production.

• Cost: Polarizing all glass surfaces (windshields, headlights, mirrors) would significantly increase vehicle prices.

​​4. Safety and Regulatory Hurdles​​ • Global Standards: Automotive regulations (e.g., FMVSS, ECE) require headlights to meet strict brightness and beam patterns. Polarization could reduce effective light output, violating these rules.

• Driver Adaptation: Tilting one’s head (e.g., to check mirrors) would alter the polarization angle, causing sudden glare or darkness.

​​5. Existing Alternatives​​ Car manufacturers prioritize more practical solutions to reduce glare: • Automatic High-Beam Dimming: Uses cameras to detect oncoming traffic and adjust beams.

• Adaptive Driving Beams (ADB): Matrix LEDs or laser lights that "mask" oncoming cars while keeping other areas bright.

• Improved Optics: Better reflector designs and LED cutoff shields to minimize scatter.

• Anti-Glare Coatings: Hydrophobic or anti-reflective windshield coatings (e.g., BMW’s "Glareshield").

​​Historical Context​​ • 1950s Experiments: Chrysler briefly tested polarized headlights and windshields in the 1950s but abandoned the concept due to the issues above.

• Sunglasses vs. Windshields: While polarized sunglasses work for individuals, scaling this to vehicles requires universal adoption—a near-impossible coordination challenge.

​​Conclusion​​ While polarized glass could theoretically reduce glare, its trade-offs in safety, cost, and practicality make it inferior to modern adaptive lighting and optical innovations. Automotive engineers continue to focus on smart, dynamic systems (e.g., ADB, LiDAR-guided beams) that balance glare reduction with reliable visibility. Until polarization technology evolves to address these flaws, it’s unlikely to appear in production vehicles.

[st4rboyloser]

I've been playing Vondel for the past couple of days. It's a bit more CQB-based (I'm slightly better at CQB but I'm really just all in on the midrange, think 15-60 meters) and the strongholds feel easier and I get more loot anyway.

Al Mazrah feels like the old wild west in some ways, like I'm at the OK Corral or on the frontier gunslinging or in literally any southern part of Arizona/California. I never could get into Ashika Island (it just doesn't feel right, it feels like seasonal depression, worse so than Vondel even).

I like the FJX Imperium because its quickscoping potential is off the charts. It's pretty much exactly like the original MW2 Intervention in so many ways, particularly the appearance, the ADS animation (I think they wanted to pay homage to the smoothness of the original Intervention), the high damage and reasonable fire rate and the fact that oh my god is it awesome with flinch resistance and low aiming idle sway.

I just got the holographic sight I wanted from the PDSW. It was a thermal holographic sight (which makes a fine replacement for the weird reflex rail I was using). That being said it shines light on HOW BAD AND INACCURATE MY GUN IS AT RANGE. I mean holy shit. I aim at the furthest target (granted I usually don't have a problem with them) but even with my gyro controls (which make fine adjustments in aiming easier, as I can just tilt my controller slightly) I was hard pressed to land a single shot on the fucking dummy. I will be grinding the Chimera to use that optic for it, or else maybe the BAS-P (because I often see people use the optic with both of those guns). I wonder even if it will work on other rifles (I am curious about the Lockwood MK2. I do think I'll have to grind to get the other popular thermal/NV optic that goes on snipers, but I forget its name. This of course will be for the FJX.)

Hey, do you think the FJX Imperium will be worth something in Black Ops 6? An unspoken meta? I mean, in terms of damage, MWII and MWIII weapons really aren't that bad in BO6, and as a matter of fact the Kar98K and Superi 46 are still often used as well-known metas. MWIII's Gutter Knife is way better than BO6's Knife. However, I did try to make myself an M4 build from MWII and if I'm being honest while it had damage at most ranges similar to a new-er BO6 gun (the beloved Kilo 141, previously seen in CODM and MW2019), dawg, the recoil was so bad I never tried to use it. (It was one of the lower recoil weapons from MWII, which makes sense given MWII has a sort of Mil-Sim sort of vibe to it that COD never really did before except maybe for Ghosts). It was actually comparable to my favorite MCW build. (omg I could gush for weeks how my MCW build was so pretty I mean MY GOD did I design a good lookin- rifle. I did a modified Scump class, which notably has a Talon grip, Slate Reflector and VT-7 Spitfire, but I did it over the Well-Traveled build, so the gun was all decorated and shit also with stickers and decals and charms, then there was this sort of accent of cynical, dull black that made the gun look so cool. Sort of related, but, well, I'm on a huge yapping sesh and another tangent couldn't do what I haven't already done right now. Anyway, this 7yo was playing with me in Bootcamp cuz of Squad Fill, and I pick up my loadout from a crate cuz we're in the final circle. It was the dope-ass MCW, my trans-flag-theme Renetti I hadn't matured from, and I also had me some general stuff. I was wearing my Numbers Woods skin I grinded seven hours for cuz in the summer I'm a no-life- I'm not really ever allowed to go anywhere or do anything- and this kid already went "Wow, bro, where did you get that skin?" So we end up winning and this MCW just feels so amazing. Anyway, imagine no recoil, 9-shot kill which makes for a kill in a tiny split second if I'm accurate, some pretty nice range, a nice little click that kind of sounds like tapping soft-soled shoes on the ground, and some dull, sort of bright visuals. It's a shame I only got the fucking pre-order disco-type bonus camo in MW3 cuz I would have FUCKED THAT UP in DMZ. It's chill tho, I can still use my beloved Basilisk in BO6 and call it the West Coast Striker.)

Hey, here are some fun gun blueprint names I made up:

West Coast Striker- Basilisk, with the disco skin from the BO6 Pre-order bonus Tampa Bay- Modified Thorns blueprint for the Tanto .22, with Granite camo Napalm In 'Nam- Modified Wild Manners Blackcell blueprint, with a more low-recoil, long-range build. Alligator- Modified Unrepentant build for the Marine SP, modified to be deadly at a longer close-range range. Pretty much the same case as the Tampa Bay. AK-Fiddy Cal- SVD, modified to be more effective in CQB (including utilizing the iron sights). Speed Drill/Speedier Drill- A pair of Kilo 141 builds I made. Speed Drill is meant to work with the Overkill wildcard, and Speedier Drill makes use of the Gunfighter wildcard. They're called that for their relatively fast movement and reload speeds, which reminded me of US Marines speed drills. Golden Grinch- This is actually for CODM but fuck it, it's creative. The USS-9 modded to be long-range. Handles slightly better than the Interdimensional Mythic build everyone likes, plus it has a sweet Holographic/Reflex optic on it. My first gold camo ever, actually.

I made these names up because I was looking to make some pretty dope builds similar to the typa shit you see in a good MWIII match where everyone has a bundle or two they bought.

genuinely don’t know a single thing about any of this but i think it’s pretty cool to read through

[yr-bed]

Early colour photographs by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

Using a railway-car darkroom provided by Emperor Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky travelled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 using his three-image colour photography to record its many aspects. While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the US Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitised and the colour triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality colour images of Russia and its neighbours from over a century ago. [...] The method of color photography used by Prokudin-Gorsky was first suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and demonstrated in 1861, but good results were not possible with the photographic materials available at that time. In imitation of the way a normal human eye senses color, the visible spectrum of colors was divided into three channels of information by capturing it in the form of three black-and-white photographs, one taken through a red filter, one through a green filter, and one through a blue filter. The resulting three photographs could be projected through filters of the same colors and exactly superimposed on a screen, synthesizing the original range of color additively; or viewed as an additive color image by one person at a time through an optical device known generically as a chromoscope or photochromoscope, which contained colored filters and transparent reflectors that visually combined the three into one full-color image; or used to make photographic or mechanical prints in the complementary colors cyan, magenta and yellow, which, when superimposed, reconstituted the color subtractively. It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be quickly and easily combined into one. The Library of Congress undertook a project in 2000 to make digital scans of all the photographic material received from Prokudin-Gorsky's heirs and contracted with the photographer Walter Frankhauser to combine the monochrome negatives into color images. He created 122 color renderings using a method he called digichromatography and commented that each image took him around six to seven hours to align, clean and color-correct.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

[trentonhoshikocinematography]

This Video Covers: 🎥 So you've finished your 3 point lighting setup, but now your backgrounds look dull: break them up! Homogenous light on your background might not fit your scene and presents a wasted environmental storytelling opportunity! Learn about 6 tools and techniques for breaking up background lighting easily!

📺 Related Videos To Watch:

+Aputure 2x Fresnel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV_d8avKE70 

+Wellmaking Snoot Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryBJjovrR2g 

+Wellmaking Snoot Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y_OyjUbqtc 

📹 Gear Discussed and Used Affiliate Links:

+GVM p80s LED Monolight + 10% OFF COUPON: https://collabs.shop/sbgtmk 

+Aputure Fresnel Lens That Is Affordable and Effective: https://amzn.to/3Ymfpxq 

+Wellmaking Optical Snoot: https://amzn.to/3ZTIsZW 

+5-In-1 Reflector – Medium: https://amzn.to/3uLFGKQ 

+5-In-1 Reflector – Large: https://amzn.to/3GuVQLa 

[stevebattle]

Scorpion (1983) by Harprit Sandhu, Bob Syeszycki and Foad Rekabi, University of Illinois, for Rhino Robots Inc., Champaign, Il. The Scorpion is a robotic terminal, designed to follow instructions and return data sent over an RS-232 link. It’s based on the 6502 microprocessor with two software controllable 6522 Versatile Interface Adapters. Sensors include a pair of downward facing photo-reflectors enabling it to follow a tape on the ground, and it has bump sensors on each of its four sides. The most unusual feature is a two-axis optical dish, with a single photocell at its focal point. This dish can be scanned vertically and horizontally with a resolution of 1.5 degrees per step. "Conventional vision systems are too expensive. What if we could build an optical scanner that scanned the environment, collected the information, and displayed the information on the video screen? A display of 40 characters by 25 lines would produce 1000 pixels of varying brightness. This should be sufficient for recognizing many simple objects. We could experiment with pattern recognition, perform calculations to enhance contrast, and find edges. To gather this information, a cadmium/sulfide (CdS) photosensor is mounted at the focal point of a solar cigarette lighter." – The Scorpion Software Overview, by Harprit Sandhu, Robotics Age, January, February, March 1984.

[kaontic]

He’s picture perfect y’all 💚

[rjalker]

We had been at the South Pole a week. The outside thermometer read fifty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The winter was just beginning.

"What do you think we should transmit to McMurdo?" I asked Rizzo.

He put down his magazine and half-sat up in his bunk. For a moment there was silence, except for the nearly inaudible hum of the machinery that jammed our tiny dome, and the muffled shrieking of the ever-present wind, above us.

(read-more was here)

Rizzo looked at the semi-circle of control consoles, computers, and meteorological sensors with an expression of disgust that could be produced only by a drafted soldier.

"Tell 'em it's cold, it's gonna get colder, and we've both got appendicitis and need replacements immediately."

"Very clever," I said, and started touching the buttons that would automatically transmit the sensors' memory tapes.

Rizzo sagged back into his bunk. "Why?" He asked the curved ceiling of our cramped quarters. "Why me? Why here? What did I ever do to deserve spending the whole goddammed winter at the goddammed South Pole?"

"It's strictly impersonal," I assured him. "Some bright young meteorologist back in Washington has convinced the Pentagon that the South Pole is the key to the world's weather patterns. So here we are."

"It doesn't make sense," Rizzo continued, unhearing. His dark, broad-boned face was a picture of wronged humanity. "Everybody knows that when the missiles start flying, they'll be coming over the North Pole…. The goddammed Army is a hundred and eighty degrees off base."

"That's about normal for the Army, isn't it?" I was a drafted soldier, too.

Rizzo swung out of the bunk and paced across the dimly-lit room. It only took a half-dozen paces; the dome was small and most of it was devoted to machinery.

"Don't start acting like a caged lion," I warned. "It's going to be a long winter."

"Yeah, guess so." He sat down next to me at the radio console and pulled a pack of cigarets from his shirt pocket. He offered one to me, and we both smoked in silence for a minute or two.

"Got anything to read?"

I grinned. "Some microspool catalogues of stars."

"Stars?"

"I'm an astronomer … at least, I was an astronomer, before the National Emergency was proclaimed."

Rizzo looked puzzled. "But I never heard of you."

"Why should you?"

"I'm an astronomer too."

"I thought you were an electronicist."

He pumped his head up and down. "Yeah … at the radio astronomy observatory at Greenbelt. Project OZMA. Where do you work?"

"Lick Observatory … with the 120-inch reflector."

"Oh … an optical astronomer."

"Certainly."

"You're the first optical man I've met." He looked at me a trifle queerly.

I shrugged. "Well, we've been around a few millennia longer than you static-scanners."

"Yeah, guess so."

"I didn't realize that Project OZMA was still going on. Have you had any results yet?"

It was Rizzo's turn to shrug. "Nothing yet. The project has been shelved for the duration of the emergency, of course. If there's no war, and the dish doesn't get bombed out, we'll try again."

"Still listening to the same two stars?"

"Yeah … Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. They're the only two Sun-type stars within reasonable range that might have planets like Earth."

"And you expect to pick up radio signals from an intelligent race."

"Hope to."

I flicked the ash off my cigaret. "You know, it always struck me as rather hopeless … trying to find radio signals from intelligent creatures."

"Whattaya mean, hopeless?"

"Why should an intelligent race send radio signals out into interstellar space?" I asked. "Think of the power it requires, and the likelihood that it's all wasted effort, because there's no one within range to talk to."

"Well … it's worth a try, isn't it … if you think there could be intelligent creatures somewhere else … on a planet of another star."

"Hmph. We're trying to find another intelligent race; are we transmitting radio signals?"

"No," he admitted. "Congress wouldn't vote the money for a transmitter that big."

"Exactly," I said. "We're listening, but not transmitting."

Rizzo wasn't discouraged. "Listen, the chances—just on statistical figuring alone—the chances are that there're millions of other solar systems with intelligent life. We've got to try contacting them! They might have knowledge that we don't have … answers to questions that we can't solve yet…."

"I completely agree," I said. "But listening for radio signals is the wrong way to do it."

"Huh?"

"Radio broadcasting requires too much power to cover interstellar distances efficiently. We should be looking for signals, not listening for them."

"Looking?"

"Lasers," I said, pointing to the low-key lights over the consoles. "Optical lasers. Super-lamps shining out in the darkness of the void. Pump in a modest amount of electrical power, excite a few trillion atoms, and out comes a coherent, pencil-thin beam of light that can be seen for millions of miles."

"Millions of miles aren't lightyears," Rizzo muttered.

"We're rapidly approaching the point where we'll have lasers capable of lightyear ranges. I'm sure that some intelligent race somewhere in this galaxy has achieved the necessary technology to signal from star to star—by light beams."

"Then how come we haven't seen any?" Rizzo demanded.

"Perhaps we already have."

"What?"

"We've observed all sorts of variable stars—Cepheids, RR Lyrae's, T Tauri's. We assume that what we see are stars, pulsating and changing brightness for reasons that are natural, but unexplainable to us. Now, suppose what we are really viewing are laser beams, signalling from planets that circle stars too faint to be seen from Earth?"

In spite of himself, Rizzo looked intrigued.

"It would be fairly simple to examine the spectra of such light sources and determine whether they're natural stars or artificial laser beams."

"Have you tried it?"

I nodded.

"And?"

I hesitated long enough to make him hold his breath, waiting for my answer. "No soap. Every variable star I've examined is a real star."

He let out his breath in a long, disgusted puff. "Ahhh, you were kidding all along. I thought so."

"Yes," I said. "I suppose I was."

Time dragged along in the weather dome. I had managed to smuggle a small portable telescope along with me, and tried to make observations whenever possible. But the weather was usually too poor. Rizzo, almost in desperation for something to do, started to build an electronic image-amplifier for me.

Our one link with the rest of the world was our weekly radio message from McMurdo. The times for the messages were randomly scrambled, so that the chances of their being intercepted or jammed were lessened. And we were ordered to maintain strict radio silence.

As the weeks sloughed on, we learned that one of our manned satellites had been boarded by the Reds at gunpoint. Our space-crews had put two Red automated spy-satellites out of commission. Shots had been exchanged on an ice-island in the Arctic. And six different nations were testing nuclear bombs.

We didn't get any mail of course. Our letters would be waiting for us at McMurdo when we were relieved. I thought about Gloria and our two children quite a bit, and tried not to think about the blast and fallout patterns in the San Francisco area, where they were.

"My wife hounded me until I spent pretty nearly every damned cent I had on a shelter, under the house," Rizzo told me. "Damned shelter is fancier than the house. She's the social leader of the disaster set. If we don't have a war, she's gonna feel damned silly."

I said nothing.

The weather cleared and steadied for a while (days and nights were indistinguishable during the long Antarctic winter) and I split my time evenly between monitoring the meteorological sensors and observing the stars. The snow had covered the dome completely, of course, but our "snorkel" burrowed through it and out into the air.

"This dome's just like a submarine, only we're submerged in snow instead of water," Rizzo observed. "I just hope we don't sink to the bottom."

"The calculations show that we'll be all right."

He made a sour face. "Calculations proved that airplanes would never get off the ground."

The storms closed in again, but by the time they cleared once more, Rizzo had completed the image-amplifier for me. Now, with the tiny telescope I had, I could see almost as far as a professional instrument would allow. I could even lie comfortably in my bunk, watch the amplifier's viewscreen, and control the entire set-up remotely.

Then it happened.

At first it was simply a curiosity. An oddity.

I happened to be studying a Cepheid variable star—one of the huge, very bright stars that pulsate so regularly that you can set your watch by them. It had attracted my attention because it seemed to be unusually close for a Cepheid—only 700 lightyears away. The distance could be easily gauged by timing the star's pulsations.[1]

I talked Rizzo into helping me set up a spectrometer. We scavenged shamelessly from the dome's spare parts bin and finally produced an instrument that would break up the light of the star into its component wavelengths, and thereby tell us much about the star's chemical composition and surface temperature.

At first I didn't believe what I saw.

The star's spectrum—a broad rainbow of colors—was criss-crossed with narrow dark lines. That was all right. They're called absorption lines; the Sun has thousands of them in its spectrum. But one line—one—was an insolently bright emission line. All the laws of physics and chemistry said it couldn't be there.

But it was.

We photographed the star dozens of times. We checked our instruments ceaselessly. I spent hours scanning the star's "official" spectrum in the microspool reader. The bright emission line was not on the catalogue spectrum. There was nothing wrong with our instruments.

Yet the bright line showed up. It was real.

"I don't understand it," I admitted. "I've seen stars with bright emission spectra before, but a single bright line in an absorption spectrum! It's unheard-of. One single wavelength … one particular type of atom at one precise energy-level … why? Why is it emitting energy when the other wavelengths aren't?"

Rizzo was sitting on his bunk, puffing a cigaret. He blew a cloud of smoke at the low ceiling. "Maybe it's one of those laser signals you were telling me about a couple weeks ago."

I scowled at him. "Come on, now. I'm serious. This thing has me puzzled."

"Now wait a minute … you're the one who said radio astronomers were straining their ears for nothing. You're the one who said we ought to be looking. So look!" He was enjoying his revenge.

I shook my head, and turned back to the meteorological equipment.

But Rizzo wouldn't let up. "Suppose there's an intelligent race living on a planet near a Cepheid variable star. They figure that any other intelligent creatures would have astronomers who'd be curious about their star, right? So they send out a laser signal that matches the star's pulsations. When you look at the star, you see their signal. What's more logical?"

"All right," I groused. "You've had your joke…."

"Tell you what," he insisted. "Let's put that one wavelength into an oscilloscope and see if a definite signal comes out. Maybe it'll spell out 'Take me to your leader' or something."

I ignored him and turned my attention to Army business. The meteorological equipment was functioning perfectly, but our orders read that one of us had to check it every twelve hours. So I checked and tried to keep my eyes from wandering as Rizzo tinkered with a photocell and oscilloscope.

"There we are," he said, at length. "Now let's see what they're telling us."

In spite of myself I looked up at the face of the oscilloscope. A steady, gradually sloping greenish line was traced across the screen.

"No message," I said.

Rizzo shrugged elaborately.

"If you leave the 'scope on for two days, you'll find that the line makes a full swing from peak to null," I informed him. "The star pulsates every two days, bright to dim."

"Let's turn up the gain," he said, and he flicked a few knobs on the front of the 'scope.

The line didn't change at all.

"What's the sweep speed?" I asked.

"One nanosecond per centimeter." That meant that each centimeter-wide square on the screen's face represented one billionth of a second. There are as many nanoseconds in one second as there are seconds in thirty-two years.

"Well, if you don't get a signal at that sensitivity, there just isn't any signal there," I said.

Rizzo nodded. He seemed slightly disappointed that his joke was at an end. I turned back to the meteorological instruments, but I couldn't concentrate on them. Somehow I felt disappointed, too. Subconsciously, I suppose, I had been hoping that Rizzo actually would detect a signal from the star. Fool! I told myself. But what could explain that bright emission line? I glanced up at the oscilloscope again.

And suddenly the smooth steady line broke into a jagged series of millions of peaks and nulls!

I stared at it.

Rizzo was back on his bunk again, reading one of his magazines. I tried to call him, but the words froze in my throat. Without taking my eyes from the flickering 'scope, I reached out and touched his arm.

He looked up.

"Holy Mother of God," Rizzo whispered.

For a long time we stared silently at the fluttering line dancing across the oscilloscope screen, bathing our tiny dome in its weird greenish light. It was eerily fascinating, hypnotic. The line never stood still; it jabbered and stuttered, a series of millions of little peaks and nulls, changing almost too fast for the eye to follow, up and down, calling to us, speaking to us, up, down, never still, never quiet, constantly flickering its unknown message to us.

The line never stood still; millions of little peaks and nulls calling to us, speaking to us, never still, never quiet, constantly flickering its unknown message to us.

"Can it be … people?" Rizzo wondered. His face, bathed in the greenish light, was suddenly furrowed, withered, ancient: a mixture of disbelief and fear.

"What else could it be?" I heard my own voice answer. "There's no other explanation possible."

We sat mutely for God knows how long.

Finally Rizzo asked, "What do we do now?"

The question broke our entranced mood. What do we do? What action do we take? We're thinking men, and we've been contacted by other creatures that can think, reason, send a signal across seven hundred lightyears of space. So don't just sit there in stupified awe. Use your brain, prove that you're worthy of the tag sapiens.

"We decode the message," I announced. Then, as an after-thought, "But don't ask me how."

We should have called McMurdo, or Washington. Or perhaps we should have attempted to get a message through to the United Nations. But we never even thought of it. This was our problem. Perhaps it was the sheer isolation of our dome that kept us from thinking about the rest of the world. Perhaps it was sheer luck.

"If they're using lasers," Rizzo reasoned, "they must have a technology something like ours."

"Must have had," I corrected. "That message is seven hundred years old, remember. They were playing with lasers when King John was signing the Magna Charta and Genghis Khan owned most of Asia. Lord knows what they have now."

Rizzo blanched and reached for another cigaret.

I turned back to the oscilloscope. The signal was still flashing across its face.

"They're sending out a signal," I mused, "probably at random. Just beaming it out into space, hoping that someone, somewhere will pick it up. It must be in some form of code … but a code that they feel can be easily cracked by anyone with enough intelligence to realize that there's a message there."

"Sort of an interstellar Morse code."

I shook my head. "Morse code depends on both sides knowing the code. There's no key."

"Cryptographers crack codes."

"Sure. If they know what language is being used. We don't know the language, we don't know the alphabet, the thought processes … nothing."

"But it's a code that can be cracked easily," Rizzo muttered.

"Yes," I agreed. "Now what the hell kind of a code can they assume will be known to another race that they've never seen?"

Rizzo leaned back on his bunk and his face was lost in shadows.

"An interstellar code," I rambled on. "Some form of presenting information that would be known to almost any race intelligent enough to understand lasers…."

"Binary!" Rizzo snapped, sitting up on the bunk.

"What?"

"Binary code. To send a signal like this, they've gotta be able to write a message in units that're only a billionth of a second long. That takes computers. Right? Well, if they have computers, they must figure that we have computers. Digital computers run on binary code. Off or on … go or no-go. It's simple. I'll bet we can slap that signal on a tape and run it through our computer here."

"To assume that they use computers exactly like ours…."

"Maybe the computers are completely different," Rizzo said excitedly, "but the binary code is basic to them all. I'll bet on that! And this computer we've got here—this transistorized baby—she can handle more information than the whole Army could feed into her. I'll bet nothing has been developed anywhere that's better for handling simple one-plus-one types of operations."

I shrugged. "All right. It's worth a trial."

It took Rizzo a few hours to get everything properly set up. I did some arithmetic while he worked. If the message was in binary code, that meant that every cycle of the signal—every flick of the dancing line on our screen—carried a bit of information. The signal's wavelength was 5000 Angstroms; there are a hundred million Angstrom units to the centimeter; figuring the speed of light … the signal could carry, in theory at least, something like 600 trillion bits of information per second.

I told Rizzo.

"Yeah, I know. I've been going over the same numbers in my head." He set a few switches on the computer control board. "Now let's see how many of the 600 trillion we can pick up." He sat down before the board and pressed a series of buttons.

We watched, hardly breathing, as the computer's spools began spinning and the indicator lights flashed across the control board. Within a few minutes, the printer chugged to life.

Rizzo swivelled his chair over to the printer and held up the unrolling sheet in a trembling hand.

Numbers. Six-digit numbers. Completely meaningless.

"Gibberish," Rizzo snapped.

It was peculiar. I felt relieved and disappointed at the same time.

"Something's screwy," Rizzo said. "Maybe I fouled up the circuits…."

"I don't think so," I answered. "After all, what did you expect out of the computer? Shakespearean poetry?"

"No, but I expected numbers that would make some sense. One and one, maybe. Something that means something. This stuff is nowhere."

Our nerves must have really been wound tight, because before we knew it we were in the middle of a nasty argument—and it was over nothing, really. But in the middle of it:

"Hey, look," Rizzo shouted, pointing to the oscilloscope.

The message had stopped. The 'scope showed only the calm, steady line of the star's basic two-day-long pulsation.

It suddenly occurred to us that we hadn't slept for more than 36 hours, and we were both exhausted. We forgot the senseless argument. The message was ended. Perhaps there would be another; perhaps not. We had the telescope, spectrometer, photocell, oscilloscope, and computer set to record automatically. We collapsed into our bunks. I suppose I should have had monumental dreams. I didn't. I slept like a dead man.

When we woke up, the oscilloscope trace was still quiet.

"Y'know," Rizzo muttered, "it might just be a fluke … I mean, maybe the signals don't mean a damned thing. The computer is probably translating nonsense into numbers just because it's built to print out numbers and nothing else."

"Not likely," I said. "There are too many coincidences to be explained. We're receiving a message, I'm certain of it. Now we've got to crack the code."

As if to reinforce my words, the oscilloscope trace suddenly erupted into the same flickering pattern. The message was being sent again.

We went through two weeks of it. The message would run through for seven hours, then stop for seven. We transcribed it on tape 48 times and ran it through the computer constantly. Always the same result—six-digit numbers; millions of them. There were six different seven-hour-long messages, being repeated one after the other, constantly.

We forgot the meteorological equipment. We ignored the weekly messages from McMurdo. The rest of the world became a meaningless fiction to us. There was nothing but the confounded, tantalizing, infuriating, enthralling message. The National Emergency, the bomb tests, families, duties—all transcended, all forgotten. We ate when we thought of it and slept when we couldn't keep our eyes open any longer. The message. What was it? What was the key to unlock its meaning?

"It's got to be something universal," I told Rizzo. "Something universal … in the widest sense of the term."

He looked up from his desk, which was wedged in between the end of his bunk and the curving dome wall. The desk was littered with printout sheets from the computer, each one of them part of the message.

"You've only said that a half-million times in the past couple weeks. What the hell is universal? If you can figure that out, you're damned good."

What is universal? I wondered. You're an astronomer. You look out at the universe. What do you see? I thought about it. What do I see? Stars, gas, dust clouds, planets … what's universal about them? What do they all have that….

"Atoms!" I blurted.

Rizzo cocked a weary eye at me. "Atoms?"

"Atoms. Elements. Look…." I grabbed up a fistful of the sheets and thumbed through them. "Look … each message starts with a list of numbers. Then there's a long blank to separate the opening list from the rest of the message. See? Every time, the same length list."

"So?"

"The periodic table of the elements!" I shouted into his ear. "That's the key!"

Rizzo shook his head. "I thought of that two days ago. No soap. In the first place, the list that starts each message isn't always the same. It's the same length, all right, but the numbers change. In the second place, it always begins with 100000. I looked up the atomic weight of hydrogen—it's 1.008 something."

That stopped me for a moment. But then something clicked into place in my mind.

"Why is the hydrogen weight 1.008?" Before Rizzo could answer, I went on, "For two reasons. The system we use arbitrarily rates oxygen as 16-even. Right? All the other weights are calculated from oxygen's. And we also give the average weight of an element, counting all its isotopes. Our weight for hydrogen also includes an adjustment for tiny amounts of deuterium and tritium. Right? Well, suppose they have a system that rates hydrogen as a flat one: 1.00000. Doesn't that make sense?"

"You're getting punchy," Rizzo grumbled. "What about the isotopes? How can they expect us to handle decimal points if they don't tell us about them … mental telepathy? What about…."

"Stop arguing and start calculating," I snapped. "Change that list of numbers to agree with our periodic table. Change 1.00000 to 1.008-whatever-it-is and tackle the next few elements. The decimals shouldn't be so hard to figure out."

Rizzo grumbled to himself, but started working out the calculations. I stepped over to the dome's microspool library and found an elementary physics text. Within a few minutes, Rizzo had some numbers and I had the periodic table focused on the microspool reading machine.

"Nothing," Rizzo said, leaning over my shoulder and looking at the screen. "They don't match at all."

"Try another list. They're not all the same."

He shrugged and returned to his desk. After a while he called out, "their second number is 3.97123; it works out to 4.003-something."

It checked! "Good. That's helium. What about the next one, lithium?"

"That's 6.940."

"Right!"

Rizzo went to work furiously after that. I pushed a chair to the desk and began working up from the end of the list. It all checked out, from hydrogen to a few elements beyond the artificial ones that had been created in the laboratories here on Earth.

"That's it," I said. "That's the key. That's our Rosetta Stone … the periodic table."

Rizzo stared at the scribbled numbers and jumble of papers. "I bet I know what the other lists are … the ones that don't make sense."

"Oh?"

"There are other ways to identify the elements … vibration resonances, quantum wavelengths … somebody named Lewis came out a couple years ago with a Quantum Periodic Table…."

"They're covering all the possibilities. There are messages for many different levels of understanding. We just decoded the simplest one."

"Yeah."

I noticed that as he spoke, Rizzo's hand—still tightly clutching the pencil—was trembling and white with tension.

"Well?"

Rizzo licked his lips. "Let's get to work."

We were like two men possessed. Eating, sleeping, even talking was ignored completely as we waded through the hundreds of sheets of paper. We could decode only a small percentage of them, but they still represented many hours of communication. The sheets that we couldn't decode, we suspected, were repetitions of the same message that we were working on.

We lost all concept of time. We must have slept, more than once, but I simply don't remember. All I can recall is thousands of numbers, row upon row, sheet after sheet of numbers … and my pencil scratching symbols of the various chemical elements over them until my hand was so cramped I could no longer open the fingers.

The message consisted of a long series of formulas; that much was certain. But, without punctuation, with no knowledge of the symbols that denote even such simple things as "plus" or "equals" or "yields," it took us more weeks of hard work to unravel the sense of each equation. And even then, there was more to the message than met the eye:

"Just what the hell are they driving at?" Rizzo wondered aloud. His face had changed: it was thinner, hollow-eyed, weary, covered with a scraggly beard.

"Then you think there's a meaning behind all these equations, too?"

He nodded. "It's a message, not just a contact. They're going to an awful lot of trouble to beam out this message, and they're repeating it every seven hours. They haven't added anything new in the weeks we've been watching."

"I wonder how many years or centuries they've been sending out this message, waiting for someone to pick it up, looking for someone to answer them."

"Maybe we should call Washington…."

"No!"

Rizzo grinned. "Afraid of breaking radio silence?"

"Hell no. I just want to wait until we're relieved, so we can make this announcement in person. I'm not going to let some old wheezer in Washington get credit for this…. Besides, I want to know just what they're trying to tell us."

It was agonizing, painstaking work. Most of the formulas meant nothing to either one of us. We had to ransack the dome's meager library of microspools to piece them together. They started simply enough—basic chemical combinations: carbon and two oxygens yield CO2; two hydrogens and oxygen give water. A primer … not of words, but of equations.

The equations became steadily longer and more complex. Then, abruptly, they simplified, only to begin a new deepening, simplify again, and finally become very complicated just at the end. The last few lines were obviously repetitious.

Gradually, their meaning became clear to us.

The first set of equations started off with simple, naturally-occurring energy yielding formulas. The oxidation of cellulose (we found the formula for that in an organic chemistry text left behind by one of the dome's previous occupants), which probably referred to the burning of plants and vegetation. A string of formulas that had groupings in them that I dimly recognized as amino acids—no doubt something to do with digesting food. There were many others, including a few that Rizzo claimed had the expression for chlorophyll in them.

"Naturally-occurring, energy-yielding reactions," Rizzo summarized. "They're probably trying to describe the biological set-up on their planet."

It seemed an inspired guess.

The second set of equations again began with simple formulas. The cellulose-burning reaction appeared again, but this time it was followed by equations dealing with the oxidation of hydrocarbons: coal and oil burning? A long series of equations that bore repeatedly the symbols for many different metals came up next, followed by more on hydrocarbons, and then a string of formulas that we couldn't decipher at all.

This time it was my guess: "These look like energy-yielding reactions, too. At least in the beginning. But they don't seem to be naturally occurring types. Then comes a long story about metals. They're trying to tell us the history of their technological development—burning wood, coal and eventually oil; smelting metals … they're showing us how they developed their technology."

The final set of equations began with an ominous simplicity: a short series of very brief symbols that had the net result of four hydrogen atoms building into a helium atom. Nuclear fusion.

"That's the proton-proton reaction," I explained to Rizzo. "The type of fusion that goes on in the Sun."

The next series of equations spelled out the more complex carbon-nitrogen cycle of nuclear fusion, which was probably the primary energy source of their own Cepheid variable star. Then came a long series of equations that we couldn't decode in detail, but the symbols for uranium and plutonium, and some of the heavier elements, kept cropping up.

Then came one line that told us the whole story: the lithium-hydride equation—nuclear fusion bombs.

The equations went on to more complex reactions, formulas that no man on Earth had ever seen before. They were showing us the summation of their knowledge, and they had obviously been dealing with nuclear energies for much longer than we have on Earth.

But interspersed among the new equations, they repeated a set of formulas that always began with the lithium-hydride fusion reaction. The message ended in a way that wrenched my stomach: the fusion bomb reaction and its cohorts were repeated ten straight times.

I'm not sure of what day it was on the calendar, but the clock on the master control console said it was well past eleven.

Rizzo rubbed a weary hand across his eyes. "Well, what do you think?"

"It's pretty obvious," I said. "They have the bombs. They've had them for quite some time. They must have a lot of other weapons, too—more … advanced. They're trying to tell us their history with the equations. First they depended on natural sources of energy, plants and animals; then they developed artificial energy sources and built up a technology; finally they discovered nuclear energy."

"How long do you think they've had the bombs?"

"Hard to tell. A generation … a century. What difference does it make? They have them. They probably thought, at first, that they could learn to live with them … but imagine what it must be like to have those weapons at your fingertips … for a century. Forever. Now they're so scared of them that they're beaming their whole history out into space, looking for someone to tell them how to live with the bombs, how to avoid using them."

"You could be wrong," Rizzo said. "They could be boasting about their arsenal."

"Why? For what reason? No … the way they keep repeating those last equations. They're pleading for help."

Rizzo turned to the oscilloscope. It was flickering again.

"Think it's the same thing?"

"No doubt. You're taping it anyway, aren't you?"

"Yeah, sure. Automatically."

Suddenly, in mid-flight, the signal winked off. The pulsations didn't simply smooth out into a steady line, as they had before. The screen simply went dead.

"That's funny," Rizzo said, puzzled. He checked the oscilloscope. "Nothing wrong here. Something must've happened to the telescope."

Suddenly I knew what had happened. "Take the spectrometer off and turn on the image-amplifier," I told him.

I knew what we would see. I knew why the oscilloscope beam had suddenly gone off scale. And the knowledge was making me sick.

Rizzo removed the spectrometer set-up and flicked the switch that energized the image-amplifier's viewscreen.

"Holy God!"

The dome was flooded with light. The star had exploded.

"They had the bombs all right," I heard myself saying. "And they couldn't prevent themselves from using them. And they had a lot more, too. Enough to push their star past its natural limits."

Rizzo's face was etched in the harsh light.

"I've gotta get out of here," he muttered, looking all around the cramped dome. "I've gotta get back to my wife and find someplace where it's safe…."

"Someplace?" I asked, staring at the screen. "Where?"

[fibermarts]

Get Information About Optic Circulators

Fiber Circulator is used to minimize the dispersion of light within a fiber optic system. Fiber optic circulators, when used with a dispersion compensating module (DCM), may send light across the system while using half the fiber to produce the necessary compensatory effect.

Applications

Optical circulators enable bidirectional ports, allowing an optical signal to be transmitted and received using a single fiber. Fiber optic circulators are utilized in a variety of applications, including dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) networks, polarization mode dispersion, chromatic dispersion correction, optical add-drop modules, optical amplifiers, and fiber optic sensors.

Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Networks

Fibre Circulators in DWDM networks provide 50 dB isolation between forward and backward propagating signals.  Fiber optic circulators also have a cross-talk level of greater than 60 decibels.

Optical Add-drop Multiplexing (OADM)

Optical add-drop modules function as main filters. Optical couplers can produce this behavior by utilizing a Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG). The full bandwidth signal enters the coupler and is routed to the next port, where the FBG is inserted. The FBG reflects the required signal to the coupler, while the dropped channels depart via the port. PMD may be corrected using optical couplers, which rotate the optical signal's electric and magnetic fields.

Polarization mode dispersion (PMD)

Some fiber optic systems exhibit polarization mode dispersion (PMD), which is a natural feature of all optical media.  PMD is created by a discrepancy in light propagation velocities between the transmission medium's orthogonal main polarization states.  If the optical pulse contains both polarisation components, the individual polarisation components in fibre optic circulators will travel at different speeds and arrive at various times, causing the received optical signal to be distorted.

PMD may be corrected using optical couplers, which rotate the optical signal's electric and magnetic fields.

Chromatographic Dispersion Compensation

Optical Circulator uses a chipped Fiber Bragg Grating to adjust for chromatic dispersion. FBGs are wavelength-dependent reflectors. A portion of optical fiber is treated or doped with a substance that affects the fiber's refractive index, resulting in wavelength-dependent reflections. Chipped Fiber Bragg Gratings have numerous gratings displaced across fiber and can compensate for chromatic dispersion.

Follow our Facebook and Twitter for more information about our product.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Monitoring Webb's mirrors for optimal optics

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched to space. Its mirror is composed of 18 individual segments that have been aligned so accurately, that they effectively work as a single giant (21.6-foot, or 6.5-meter) reflector.

The process of adjusting each of these separately functioning hexagonal mirror segments requires constant oversight from a dedicated team of engineers and optics scientists.

NASA invited Dr. Marcio B. Meléndez, principal astronomical optics scientist for Webb at the Space Telescope Science Institute and member of the wavefront sensing team in the telescope branch at STScI, to tell us more about the challenges of aligning the telescope after launch, and what is required to keep it that way during scientific operations.

"Soon after the successful launch and deployment of Webb, an intricate process of aligning its large golden mirrors began. It took nearly three months to go from the initial deployments of 18 individual unfocused segments that had just flown to space, to a completely aligned system bounded only by the optical design.

"Though the precise alignment of the telescope was completed in early 2022 during commissioning, it does not stay that way naturally due to various factors such as temperature variations and so-called 'tilt' events, so a lifelong maintenance program is required.

"The wavefront sensing team responsible for keeping Webb's mirrors in order has been monitoring, investigating, trending, and occasionally moving its primary mirror segments during science operations. These activities are carried out from Webb's Mission Operations Center, located at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

"This telescope monitoring program consists of a series of observations that use special optical sensing equipment inside the Near Infrared Camera instrument (NIRCam), with a set of lenses that intentionally defocus the images of stars by a known amount. These defocused star images contain measurable features that enable the team to derive the alignment of the telescope, using a process called phase retrieval to determine what we call the 'wavefront error.'

"The telescope monitoring observations are currently scheduled every other day, interspersed among Webb's science observations, with short runtimes of about 20 minutes. All telescope monitoring observations are publicly available via the MAST archive. Observatory users and other interested investigators can also view and model the optical quality using specialized tools.

"The maintenance program also takes a 'selfie' using a specialized 'pupil imaging' lens, designed to take images of the mirror segments and not of the sky, four times a year. These pupil images are used to assess the health of the primary mirrors.

"During each observation, the team measures Webb's pointing stability or 'jitter,' which has remained six times better than design requirements. The Fine Guidance Sensor is used to command a small onboard steerable mirror to lock onto a target, while moving in orbit, without deviating more than the thickness of a human hair, seen at a distance of seven miles (11 kilometers).

"The overall optical performance of the telescope is far better than the design requirement, meaning the observations are even more sensitive to faint objects, and more discerning of fine features than was expected.

"The optical requirement for Webb was set to 150 nanometers of wavefront error, coming from a combination of uncorrectable surface figure imperfections and correctable telescope misalignments. The current uncorrectable errors are very low, at about 65 nanometers.

"The telescope alignment program aims to achieve and maintain this, and when the observed misalignments accumulate above predetermined criteria, the primary mirror segments are commanded and the system is realigned.

"Each segment from the primary mirror can be repositioned in six 'degrees of freedom,' meaning six different types of movement. A segment's curved surface can also be changed somewhat to adjust its focal length. The Webb telescope mirrors maintain passive alignment through stable support from the backplane structure. As Webb points to different locations in the sky, the heat absorbed from the sun changes, causing small (0.1 kelvins) temperature changes on the support structure that drive small physical movements.

"These tiny displacements cause mirror misalignments. This distortion is very small and accounts for only a few nanometers of change in the wavefront. In addition to this, there are sudden offsets to the structure that we call tilt events. These distinct jumps do not reverse themselves, and our current understanding of these events is that they are associated with small but abrupt releases of energy that was stored in the mirror support structure.

"The telescope mirror control updates were required to be less frequent than every two weeks. When a telescope misalignment is observed, the telescope team makes a correction within 48 hours following a well-coordinated procedure between different flight systems. During this time, we create a set of mirror movements intended to re-align the segments. These movements are transformed into commands that are then uploaded and executed.

"After applying these corrective moves, a new set of observations is taken to confirm the alignment of the telescope. Since the beginning of science operations, we have applied over 25 corrective moves. . On Oct. 3, a mirror correction was performed, after a record of 186 days since the previous mirror control update.

"With the rigorous overall maintenance program of measurement and control, the wavefront team ensures Webb's optical performance is at the highest possible level to uncover the hidden mysteries of the universe."

The fact that Webb's mirror alignment has required fewer corrections than anticipated not only provides more observation time to conduct Webb science, but also offers important takeaways for future missions.

Fewer adjustments indicates better than expected telescope stability, which will be a crucial consideration for missions like NASA's future Habitable Worlds Observatory. The Habitable Worlds Observatory will be the first space telescope designed to search for life as we know it on Earth-sized planets around nearby sun-like stars, while exploring many broader transformative astrophysics questions that will reveal secrets of the universe.

TOP IMAGE: NIRCam in-focus image at 2.12 microns is shown at left. The middle and right panels show NIRCam images at two different intentionally defocused positions, used during the telescope monitoring program, to reveal features used to assess the telescope alignment. Credit: NASA

LOWER IMAGE: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope wavefront error varies due to small mirror misalignments that are correctable, as designated by the green downward arrows. Lower values of wavefront error indicate better imaging performance. The larger misalignments shown are from sudden so-called “tilt events’ in single or multiple segments. Following a correction, as shown in green, the telescope is returned to its best possible alignment. On Oct. 3, a mirror correction was performed, after a record of 186 days since the previous mirror control update. Credit: NASA

[spacenutspod]

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander lifts off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:05 a.m. EST on Feb. 15, 2024. As part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, Intuitive Machines’ first lunar mission will carry NASA science and commercial payloads to the Moon to study plume-surface interactions, space weather/lunar surface interactions, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies, and a communication and navigation node for future autonomous navigation technologies. A suite of NASA science instruments and technology demonstrations is on the way to our nearest celestial neighbor for the benefit of humanity. Through this flight to the Moon, they will provide insights into the lunar surface environment and test technologies for future landers and Artemis astronauts. At 1:05 a.m. EST on Thursday, Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At approximately 1:53 a.m., the lander deployed from the Falcon 9 second stage. Teams confirmed it made communications contact with the company’s mission operations center in Houston. The spacecraft is stable and receiving solar power. These deliveries are part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign, which includes new solar system science to better understand planetary processes and evolution, search for evidence of water and other resources, and support long-term human exploration. “NASA scientific instruments are on their way to the Moon – a giant leap for humanity as we prepare to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “These daring Moon deliveries will not only conduct new science at the Moon, but they are supporting a growing commercial space economy while showing the strength of American technology and innovation. We have so much to learn through CLPS flights that will help us shape the future of human exploration for the Artemis Generation.”  While enroute to the Moon, NASA instruments will measure the quantity of cryogenic engine fuel as it is used, and during descent toward the lunar surface, they will collect data on plume-surface interactions and test precision landing technologies. Once on the Moon, NASA instruments will focus on investigating space weather/lunar surface interactions and radio astronomy. The Nova-C lander also will carry retroreflectors contributing to a network of location markers on the Moon for communication and navigation for future autonomous navigation technologies. NASA science aboard the lander includes: Lunar Node 1 Navigation Demonstrator: A small, CubeSat-sized experiment that will demonstrate autonomous navigation that could be used by future landers, surface infrastructure, and astronauts, digitally confirming their positions on the Moon relative to other spacecraft, ground stations, or rovers on the move. Laser Retroreflector Array: A collection of eight retroreflectors that enable precision laser ranging, which is a measurement of the distance between the orbiting or landing spacecraft to the reflector on the lander. The array is a passive optical instrument and will function as a permanent location marker on the Moon for decades to come.    Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing: A Lidar-based (Light Detection and Ranging) guidance system for descent and landing. This instrument operates on the same principles of radar but uses pulses from a laser emitted through three optical telescopes. It will measure speed, direction, and altitude with high precision during descent and touchdown.    Radio Frequency Mass Gauge: A technology demonstration that measures the amount of propellant in spacecraft tanks in a low-gravity space environment. Using sensor technology, the gauge will measure the amount of cryogenic propellant in Nova-C’s fuel and oxidizer tanks, providing data that could help predict fuel usage on future missions.    Radio-wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the Photoelectron Sheath: The instrument will observe the Moon’s surface environment in radio frequencies, to determine how natural and human-generated activity near the surface interacts with and could interfere with science conducted there. Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies: A suite of four tiny cameras to capture imagery showing how the Moon’s surface changes from interactions with the spacecraft’s engine plume during and after descent. Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C-class lunar lander, named Odysseus, is scheduled to land on the Moon’s South Pole region near the lunar feature known as Malapert A on Thursday, Feb. 22. This relatively flat and safe region is within the otherwise heavily cratered southern highlands on the side of the Moon visible from Earth. Landing near Malapert A will also help mission planners understand how to communicate and send data back to Earth from a location where Earth is low on the lunar horizon. The NASA science aboard will spend approximately seven days gathering valuable scientific data about Earth’s nearest neighbor, helping pave the way for the first woman and first person of color to explore the Moon under Artemis. Learn more about NASA’s CLPS initiative at: https://www.nasa.gov/clps -end- Karen Fox / Alise FisherHeadquarters, Washington202-358-1600 / 202-358-2546karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov   Nilufar RamjiJohnson Space Center, Houston281-483-5111nilufar.ramji@nasa.gov Antonia JaramilloKennedy Space Center, Florida321-501-8425antonia.jaramillobotero@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 15, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related TermsMissionsArtemisCommercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS)