Google To Dominate Space With 180 Satellites

... Google is planning to launch a fleet of 180 satellites to provide web access for the 4.8 billion people not yet online, according to sources close to the company.

The California-based giant will spend more than $1 billion (£600 million) on the technology, which will rival Facebook’s efforts to connect remote regions of the world.

Details remain vague, but the Wall Street Journal reports that the satellites will be small and high-capacity, and will orbit the Earth at ‘lower altitudes than traditional satellites.’

Google's venture is being led by Greg Wyler, founder of satellite-communications start-up O3b Networks, and depending on the network's final design, the group may double the number of proposed satellites.

A separate project by Google, dubbed Project Loon, is designing high-altitude balloons to provide broadband service to remote parts of the world.

The helium-filled balloons inflate to 49ft (15m) in diameter and carry transmitters that could beam 3G-speed internet to remote regions.

Project Loon was developed in the company's X Lab by the same team behind Google Glasses and the driverless car.

It is hoped that it could save developing countries the high cost of laying fibre cables to get online and lead to a dramatic increase in internet access for the likes of Africa and south-east Asia.

In April, the company also acquired Titan Aerospace, which is building solar-powered drones to provide similar connectivity.

Facebook, meanwhile, has its own drone plans.  

In March, Mark Zuckerberg revealed solar-powered drones, satellites and lasers are all being developed in the firm's labs to deliver the internet to underdeveloped countries.

He has pledged to work on technology to deliver the internet to 'the next 3 billion people' - and revealed the firm has hired experts in solar power that can keep drones flying for months at a time.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology's deputy president, Professor William Webb, said: 'The idea of using aerial platforms to deliver connectivity is one that is many decades old, from low-orbital satellites to balloons and more recently unmanned aerial vehicles.'

'The difficulty has always been one of keeping the aerial platform in the right place in the sky for weeks or months at a low enough cost. As technologies mature we get ever closer to achieving this and Facebook's intervention in this space is a welcome boost to the area.'

Facebook and Google also need to overcome regulatory hurdles, including coordinating with operators so their fleet doesn't interfere with other satellites.

'Top of the list is the need to make the drones cost-effective, reliable and demonstrate to the regulators that they can operate safely in our airspace,’ he added.

'Many other issues associated with access to radio spectrum, national telecoms regulations and more will also need to be addressed.’

By ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD

China Testing New Space Weapons

By Bill Gertz

China conducted a test of a maneuvering satellite that captured another satellite in space during what Pentagon officials say was a significant step forward for Beijing’s space warfare program.

The satellite capture involved one of three small satellites fitted with a mechanical arm that were launched July 20 as part of a covert anti-satellite weapons development program.

One official described the satellite-grabbing spacecraft as a “mobile satellite launch vehicle.”

“The United States Strategic Command’s Joint Functional Combatant Command for Space (JFCC-Space), consistent with its routine operations to maintain track of objects in space, has monitored these satellites since their launch and has noticed the relative motions of these satellites amongst each other and with respect to other space objects.” 

The Pentagon’s website Space-Track.org does not report on missions or functions of the hundreds of space objects it tracks, and Smith referred further questions to the Chinese government.

A Chinese Embassy spokesman did not return emails seeking comment on the ASAT test.

The satellites involved in the space warfare development program were identified by the Chinese as “scientific experimentation satellites,” according to a notice published July 24 in the online journal Space News.

They were identified as Chuangxin-3 (Innovation-3), Shiyan-7 (Experiment-7), and Shijian-15 (Practice-15). The spacecraft with the robotic mechanical arm that conducted the satellite capture experiment has not been authoritatively identified from among the three orbiters. However, space analysts suspect it is Shiyan-7.

Space News is published by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), which builds strategic missiles and space launchers, and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), China’s largest missile manufacturer.

The notice stated that the three satellites were launched atop a Long March-4C rocket on July 20 from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north central China.

“These three satellites are to be used for the observation of space debris and conducting scientific experiments in space maintenance techniques like space arm operations,” the statement said.

Space Track continues to identify the satellites as by their payload designations, rather than using the Chinese names.

Since no other satellites are in the same orbit as the three satellites and another satellite known as Shijian-7, “if the capture was last week, it didn’t involve any of these working together.” 

... that leaves the possibility that Payload B was captured by Payload C during a close flyby around Aug. 17.

“My actual calculations showed them getting closer than 500 meters but given the inherent error margins of the Space Track data, I stuck with a few hundred meters.”

Another possibility is that the test involved a detachable part of one satellite and its release into a separate orbit, and the subsequent recapturing of the component using the extension arm, Christy said.

“If the separation distance was small and the period of separated flight was short, then U.S. sensors are unlikely to have detected an extra object in orbit,” he said.

A third possibility is that the test involved completely different satellites that were not observed by non-government space trackers.

Christy’s analysis of the August activities revealed that the satellites conducted several experiments.

Since August, Payload C and Shijian-7 showed slight variations in orbit that are likely the result of thruster operation for position control, Christy stated in a recent blog post.

In August, Payload B, a non-maneuvering satellite, was positioned about 620 miles behind Payload C, a spacecraft that specialists say could be the craft with the manipulator arm, and Payload C gradually slowed to until is passed very close to the other satellite.

The robotic satellite may be part of efforts to develop China’s large space station set to be deployed around 2020.

However, Pentagon officials believe the small satellite activity is more closely associated with China’s secret ASAT program.

Little is known about the Chinese space warfare program, which is among the Chinese military’s most closely guarded secrets.

China conducted a direct ascent ASAT missile test in January 2007 that destroyed a Chinese weather satellite and created tens of thousands orbiting debris pieces that threaten both manned and unmanned spacecraft.

Chinese officials have told U.S. counterparts that the 2007 test was a one-time event and so far have not conducted further debris-causing satellite attack tests.

A U.S. official told the Free Beacon in August that the launch of the three satellites was part of Beijing’s covert anti-satellite warfare program.

The official said the craft with the robotic arm was viewed as the most threatening because U.S. satellites, vital strategic assets used by both the American military and civilian infrastructure, are vulnerable to kinetic or electronic disruption in space.

The official said the satellites are part of China’s “Star Wars” space weapon program that has been largely ignored by the Obama administration over concerns that pressing China to explain its space weapons would upset U.S.-China relations.

The ASAT program is a “real concern for U.S. national defense,” the official said.

Until the satellite capture, the mission of the spacecraft with the mechanical arm was unknown. It was thought that it could used to grab, gouge, or alter the orbits of other satellites.

The craft also could be used for maintenance and repair.

Rick Fisher, a Chinese military affairs specialist, said the robot-arm satellite that he believes is the Shiyan-7 is part of China’s dual-use space program that includes satellites for military close-surveillance and attack missions. Civilian applications include development of space manipulator arm technology.

“As an ASAT, a future version of the SY-7 could be used to take close-up images of U.S. satellites, to remove systems from those satellites and return them to China, to directly damage U.S. satellites or to plant ‘mines’ on those satellites or close nearby,” said Fisher, with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.

“An SY-7-like ASAT gives China the option to attack enemy satellites without creating a large cloud of debris that may also damage other Chinese satellites.”

Fisher said China recently hosted a major space conference and is seeking to position itself as a space “superpower” as a means to increase cooperation and technology acquisition from other countries.

At the conference, “Chinese officials made a deliberate appeal to Canada, which developed and built the manipulator arm used on the International Space Station and U.S. Space Shuttles,” Fisher said.

However, Fisher said China made every effort to conceal the People’s Liberation Army’s role in the space program and would probably deny any military role in the developing mechanical arm technology for offensive space operations.

“The ‘Canadarm’ [manipulator arm] was developed in Canada with Canadian funding and four were purchased by NASA for the U.S. Space Shuttle program,” he said.

China conducted a test launch of a new high-Earth orbit anti-satellite missile called the DN-2 in March, according to U.S. officials.

US Army Seeks New Technology To Replace GPS

The US army is working to limit its dependence on GPS by developing the next generation of navigation technology, including a tiny autonomous chip, the director of the Pentagon's research agency said Wednesday.

Among the fears: the GPS signal could be scrambled by an adversary, as happened recently in South Korea.

Starting in 2010, DARPA has been working on a variety of programs aimed at developing new navigation and positioning technology -- at first with the goal of extending their reach to places where satellites don't work, such as underwater.

But now, amid fears of over-reliance on -- and possible vulnerabilities with -- global positioning satellites, experts are looking to create not just a companion, but an alternative to GPS.

To that end, researchers at DARPA and the University of Michigan have created a new system that works without satellites to determine position, time and direction, all contained within a eight-cubic-millimeter chip.

The tiny chip holds three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and an atomic clock, which, together, work as an autonomous navigation system.

DARPA envisages using this technology to replace GPS in some contexts, especially in small-caliber ammunition or for monitoring people.

Another approach would use existing signals, such as those generated by broadcast antennas, radios, telephone towers and even lightning to temporarily replace GPS.

Silicon Brains To Oversee Satellites

A beautiful and expensive sight: upwards of €6 million-worth of silicon wafers, crammed with the complex integrated circuits that sit at the heart of each and every ESA mission. Years of meticulous design work went into these tiny brains, empowering satellites with intelligence. 

The image shows a collection of six silicon wafers that contain some 14 different chip designs developed by several European companies during the last eight years with ESA’s financial and technical support. 

Each of these 20 cm-diameter wafers contains between 30 and 80 replicas of each chip, each one carrying up to about 10 million transistors or basic circuit switches.

To save money on the high cost of fabrication, various chips designed by different companies and destined for multiple ESA projects are crammed onto the same silicon wafers, etched into place at specialised semiconductor manufacturing  plants or ‘fabs’, in this case LFoundry (formerly Atmel) in France.

Once manufactured, the chips, still on the wafer, are tested. The wafers are then chopped up. They become ready for use when placed inside protective packages – just like standard terrestrial microprocessors – and undergo final quality tests.

Through little metal pins or balls sticking out of their packages these miniature brains are then connected to other circuit elements – such as sensors, actuators, memory or power systems – used across the satellite.

To save the time and money needed to develop complex chips like these, ESA’s Microelectronics section maintains a catalogue of chip designs, known as Intellectual Property (IP) cores, available to European industry through ESA licence. 

Think of these IP cores as the tiniest mission ‘building blocks’: specialised designs to perform particular tasks in space, laid down within a microchip.

These IP cores range from single ‘simpler’ functions such as decoding signals from Earth to control the satellite to highly complex computer tasks such as operating a complete spacecraft.

The latter is achieved for example by the SCOC-3 ‘spacecraft controller on a chip’ developed by ESA and Astrium, which itself combines more than 20 different IP cores from other sources, seen at the bottom of the image.

SCOC3 on silicon wafer

Once manufactured, the chips, still on the wafer, are tested. The wafers are then chopped up. They become ready for use when placed inside protective packages – just like standard terrestrial microprocessors – to undergo final quality tests.

Through little metal pins or balls sticking out of their packages these miniature brains are then connected to other circuit elements – such as sensors, actuators, memory or power systems – used across the satellite.

To save the time and money needed to develop complex chips like these, ESA’s Microelectronics section maintains a catalogue of chip designs, known as Intellectual Property (IP) cores, freely available to European industry.

Think of these IP cores as the tiniest mission ‘building blocks’: specialised designs to perform particular tasks in space, laid down within a microchip.

These IP cores range from single ‘simpler’ functions such as decoding signals from Earth to control the satellite to highly complex computer tasks such as operating a complete spacecraft.

The latter is achieved for example by the SCOC3 ‘spacecraft controller on a chip’ developed by ESA and Astrium, which itself combines more than 20 different IP cores from other sources, seen at the bottom of the image.

Each IP core is coded in a ‘hardware description language’ that can then guide the manufacturing process. Today’s state-of-the-art minimum sizes of integrated circuit tracks are measured in tens of nanometres.

Via: "ESA"

EmDrive: China's Radical New Space Drive

Scientists in China have built and tested a radical new space drive. Although the thrust it produces may not be enough to lift your mobile phone, it looks like it could radically change the satellite industry. Satellites are just the start: with superconducting components, this technology could generate the thrust to drive everything from deep space probes to flying cars. And it all started with a British engineer whose invention was ignored and ridiculed in his home country.

The latest research comes from a team headed by Yang Juan, Professor of Propulsion Theory and Engineering of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Northwestern Polytechnic University in Xi'an. Titled "Net thrust measurement of propellantless microwave thruster," it was published last year in the academic journal Acta Physica Sinica, now translated into English.

The technology is controversial because of that key word "propellantless". Space drives rely on Newton's laws of motion: all are based on the principle of firing propellant out the back at high speed, pushing the spacecraft forward. Even with endless power from solar cells, thrust is still limited by the supply of propellant, even with high-velocity ion drives. Numerous attempts have been made to overcome this, from the infamous Dean Drive of the 1950's to Nasa's experiments with antigravity from spinning superconductors in the 1990's. All have failed, and the efforts of pseudoscientific cranks and scammers have left the field thoroughly discredited.

British engineer Roger Shaywer stepped into this dangerous field in 2001, after twenty years with European satellite firm EADS Astrium. He set up his own company, Satellite Propulsion Research (SPR) Ltd, with the aid of a modest grant from the UK's Department of Trade and Industry.

Shawyer aimed to develop an EmDrive: a closed, conical container which, when filled with resonating microwaves, experiences a net thrust towards the wide end. It seems to violate of the law of conservation of momentum, implied by Newton, which says that no closed system can have a net thrust. However, Shawyer says net thrust occurs because the microwaves have a group velocity which is greater in one direction than the other and Einstein's relativity comes into play. Group velocity, the speed of a collection of electromagnetic waves, is a tricky business -- a pulse of light can even have a group velocity which is greater than the speed of light -- but can it really cause net thrust?

Shawyer built a demonstration thruster to test the theory in 2003. The thrust was tiny -- 16 mN, equal to the weight of a couple of peanuts -- but enough to validate the concept. However, sceptics were quick to attack. None of them actually inspected the apparatus, but Shawyer was assailed from all sides online and in the science press. Criticism was unsophisticated: Newton said it was impossible, therefore he must be a fraud. Even the most advanced theoretical critique, produced by John Costella, a PhD in relativistic electrodynamics, amounted to arguing about the direction of an arrow on one of Shawyer's diagrams.

Shawyer continued to produce and test more advanced demonstrators, working out elaborate ways of ensuring that the test results are valid and not the result of air currents, friction, ionization, interference or electromagnetic effects.

Such effects can easily ruin experiments where small forces are involved. The Nasa investigation into supposed antigravity eventually found that the apparatus was actually causing electronic interference within the measuring system and producing false readings rather than negating the Earth's pull.

Boeing's Phantom Works, which works on various classified projects and has been involved in space research, went as far as acquiring and testing the EmDrive, but say they are no longer working with Shawyer.

In 2007 the Russian Research Institute of Space Systems launched an experimental micro-satellite called Yubileiny (Jubilee) with a "non-traditional" engine which, according to Director Valery Mesnshikov, functions without ejecting reaction mass. However, it was later stated that "further developments" were needed and nothing further appears to be been published on Russian reactionless drives.

Meanwhile, the EmDrive was picked up by Yang at Xi'an, who has a background in space propulsion systems.

The Chinese team took a cautious approach. They started with a new analysis in terms of quantum theory in 2008 which indicated that the theoretical basis was sound and net thrust is possible. The next paper in 2010 quantified the amount of thrust that could be produced, and stated that the team was getting positive experimental results. The latest paper describes their latest thruster and gives the test results in details, showing that with a couple of kilowatts of power they can produce 720 mN (about 72 grams) of thrust.

It may not sound very much, less than three ounces, but in space a little thrust goes a long way. Boeing's advanced XIPS thruster, which fires out Xenon ions at high speed, generates less than a quarter as much thrust from twice as much power. It's used to maintain satellites in position, or move them to a slightly different orbit. Crucially, Xips weights about twenty kilos, more than an equivalent EmDrive, and the propellant for prolonged operation can weigh much more.

Propellant can account for as much as half the launch weight of a geostationary satellite. This means that, in principle, fitting one with an EmDrive rather than a conventional drive, could halve launch costs. Shawyer notes that EmDrives no more powerful than the Chinese one could keep the International Space Station in position without the need for costly refueling.

Meanwhile, Shawyer is moving on to bigger plans. The amount of thrust produced by an EmDrive is determined by the Q value of the cavity, which measures how well it resonates. A tuning fork has a high Q value in air; put it in treacle and it is damped and does not resonate so well. By using superconducting apparatus, Shawyer says that the Q value, and hence thrust, can be boosted by a factor of several thousand -- producing perhaps a tonne of thrust per kilowatt of power. Suddenly it's not about giving a satellite a slight nudge, it's about launching spacecraft.

Shawyer estimates that the prototype superconducting thruster could be ready in 2016. Even the most hardened sceptic would find it hard to ignore a thruster capable of levitating itself in the air. However, the EmDrive cannot violate the law of conservation of energy. It can exert force, but accelerating a vehicle over a distance still requires a huge amount of power, and ultimately it still needs a big power supply. Personal EmDrive jetpacks are unlikely, but Shawyer has plans for a deep space propulsion unit, an EmDrive-assisted spaceplane capable of taking off from an a runway and travelling to Australia in three hours -- and a personal air vehicle the size of a car.

However, aerospace companies are not in a hurry to do business with Shawyer, and he will not be able to build the superconducting thruster without funding.

Yang's experimental work is continuing; she says she is not able to discuss her work until more results are published this year. There is also the tantalising prospect of a demonstration at an aerospace conference. This might make the EmDrive hard to ignore and force a showdown with skeptics. So far the reaction in the west to Yang's work has been muted -- perhaps polite disbelief would be the best description. 2013 may change all that.

Via: "Wired"

TDRS: Communicating Critical Data

As a vital information pipeline for space-based research and exploration ambitions, the TDRS constellation fulfills NASA's broadest communication demands. 

Now into it's fourth operational decade, the TDRS legacy continues to be communications excellence. 

The addition of the third generation of spacecraft will replenish the constellation and ensure that the critical lifeline of space-to-ground communication support will be available for many years to come. 

The International Quantum Teleportation Space Race

By Adam Mann,

There is an international quantum teleportation space race heating up. Around the world, countries are investing time and millions of dollars into the technology, which uses satellites to beam bits of quantum information down from the sky and and could profoundly change worldwide communication.

This is not a maybe-sort-of-one-day quantum technology. Quantum teleportation has been proven experimentally many times over and researchers are now eyeing the heavens as their next big leap forward. Most of what remains are the nuts and bolts engineering challenges (and some more money) before it becomes a thing of the present.

Though it may be disappointing to hear, quantum teleportation is not about instantly sending a person or object between two places – this is no “Beam me up, Scotty,” or “Bampf!” Instead, the technique involves the perhaps even freakier task of separating a subatomic particle from its quantum state.

“Once you disembody the state of one of particle, you can then recreate the particle in remote copy,” said physicist and computer scientist Charles Bennett of IBM, who co-authored the first paper on quantum teleportation in 1993.

Though the team’s paper was purely theoretical at the time, scientists since then have done many experiments teleporting particles over longer and longer distances. In the past year, a team from Chinaand another in Austria set new records for quantum teleportation, using a laser to beam photons through the open air over 60 and 89 miles, respectively. This is many times farther than the previous record of 10 miles, set in 2010 by the same Chinese team. With scientists extending quantum teleportation to such distances, many are already considering the next step: zapping particles and information from an orbiting satellite to a relay station on Earth.

If developed, quantum teleportation satellites could allow spies to pass large amounts of information back and forth or create unhackable codes. Should we ever build quantum computers – which would be smaller and exponentially more powerful than modern computers, able to model complex phenomenon, rapidly crunch numbers, and render modern encryption keys useless – they would need quantum teleporters in order to be networked together in a quantum version of the internet.

China plans to launch a satellite with a quantum teleportation experiment payload in 2016 and the European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies are hoping to fund their own quantum teleportation satellite projects in the coming years. Conspicuously, the U.S. is far behind the pack because of a bureaucratic reshuffling that left quantum communication research experiments without government support in 2008. Whoever loses this new competition could fail to capitalize on the promise of quantum communication altogether.

How It works

The trick to teleportation comes from a quirk of quantum mechanics that allows you to create two particles that are completely in tune with one another, which are known as an entangled pair.

Let’s say you have two entangled photons and you are measuring their polarization, or the direction in which they are oscillating. If one photon has a vertical polarization, you know the other one is going to be exactly the same. The trouble is that quantum mechanics works on probability – before you measure a particle’s polarization it is equally likely to be horizontal or vertical. According to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, particles exist in some strange simultaneous vertical/horizontal state until you make a measurement. With an entangled pair, you can just measure one particle, and no matter how far away the other one is from the first, it will instantly gain whatever property you measured.

“It’s like two people play dice and they always get the same result; it’s always random but they always get the same result,” said physicist Rupert Ursin of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, who works with one team that set the recent distance record.

Of course, even with such dice, there’s no way to compose a signal or transfer information. You could give your friend one die and tell him to stand in another room, agreeing beforehand on a binary system where rolling an even number means 0 and an odd number means 1. But because the outcome of each roll is random, all your friend would end up doing is sending you a haphazard string of zeroes and ones.

To send a controllable signal, you need quantum teleportation. This requires three subatomic particles, say photons. Two of the photons are entangled with one another, and the third contains the bit of information you want to send. For a simple example of how this works, let’s say you place one photon from the entangled pair in L.A. and the other in New York.

In L.A., a scientist measures one of the entangled photons and the third particle at the same time. She doesn’t find out their exact properties but just their relative ones – if they are the same or opposite one another – and the particles get destroyed during this measurement. Let’s say she discovers that the particles are opposites and relays this information to her New York colleague. He then measures his entangled photon and knows that the opposite of that measurement is the bit of information he was meant to receive.

Another way to explain it involves a CIA-interrogation analogy that Charles Bennett, co-author of the first quantum teleportation study, likes to use. Imagine that a woman named Alice who lives in Seattle has uncovered information that the CIA desperately needs to thwart an attack. The CIA wants to interrogate her and they need to be able to do it at their headquarters in Washington D.C. Trouble is, Alice doesn’t want to come to D.C. and nothing will persuade her to do so. But the CIA happens to have a pair of magical twin agents named Romulus and Remus who always answer yes or no questions exactly the same way.

So the CIA sends agent Remus to Seattle, not to interrogate Alice, but just to learn if she gets along with Remus. The two meet and get to know each other. Alice discovers that she hates Remus. Every question that she would have answered yes to in life, he answers no. So now all Remus has to do is tell his boss back at headquarters that his and Alice’s answers are opposite. Now the CIA can simply question Romulus to get the information they need.

But just as Romulus and Remus started out together in D.C., quantum teleportation scientists usually don’t have entangled particle pairs just sitting around in two different locations. During an experiment, researchers will often generate an entangled pair in one place. They measure the state of one of the entangled particles and compare that to a third particle containing the bit of data to be sent. They then use a laser beam to send the information about the particles’ relative states, along with the second entangled particle, to another location.

Because subatomic particles are sensitive and small, they’re liable to get lost, meaning that experimenters have to be careful about their protocols. The first quantum teleportation experiments involved sending particles across small spaces, on the order of inches. Eventually, researchers figured out how to shoot a particle several feet, and then hundreds of feet.

“Now we want to show that this kind of communication might be useful on a global scale,” said physicistAnton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, who led the Austrian quantum-distance team. “The method of choice is to use quantum communication via satellite,” he added, since photons can’t travel very far in glass fiber without getting absorbed.

The Race To Space

Being able to do this quantum satellite teleportation would provide many new advantages, in particular the ability to create cryptographic keys for sensitive information that would be stored in subatomic particles. If anyone were to measure the particle, they would change its properties so spy agencies would always know if they’ve been hacked. Someday in the future, James Bond and MI6 could be passing secret codes back and forth on a teleported light beam through space.

With this in mind, “there are now a couple of research groups considering how to build a quantum payload suitable for a satellite,” said physicist Thomas Jennewein of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. “There’s basically a race going on to get into space first with a quantum satellite.”

Though Japanese researchers are planning a small quantum experiment on a laser-communication satellite named Socrates that will launch in 2014, the only group with a scheduled satellite devoted to quantum communication is from China.

The Chinese satellite would show the feasibility of several technologies, including quantum key distribution, entanglement distribution, and quantum teleportation, said physicist Yu-Ao Chen of the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, who worked with the Chinese team led by Jian-Wei Pan that set the recent distance record. The main obstacle is how to shrink down the large equipment used in their previous record-breaking teleportation experiment, he said.

The Chinese space agency has put $554 million toward funding five scientific satellites over the coming years, one of which will be used for quantum communication. This is a new direction for China, which has in the past launched more than 100 satellites, but until now only one for dedicated scientific experiments. While the exact figure for the quantum communication project is unknown, it could be on the order of $50 to 100 million, estimated Zeilinger. This stands in contrast to Europe and Canada, which have invested an order of magnitude less for their projects.

This has put China in an enviable position. Other teams are lining up for the chance to collaborate and use their satellite for quantum teleportation experiments. “We already have a deal with Austria to use it when it passes over Vienna,” said Chen. “Germany, Canada, Italy, and many other groups also want to be involved in this project.”

Absent from this tussle is the U.S., whose quantum communication programs have floundered in recent years. Much of this can be traced back to a programmatic reorganization that occurred when the newly created Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – aka DARPA for spies – took over quantum computing research funding from the National Security Agency and National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2008. IARPA said that it would no longer be providing money to the various quantum communications projects because it didn’t want to fund other agencies’ research.

“One of the first things that happened was the quantum communication research program was put into a good deal of chaos, and largely ended,” said physicist Richard Hughes of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Many quantum communication researchers were upset, prompting them towrite an open letter to John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology policy.

While in 2012 U.S. government agencies have shown renewed interest in such research, “there’s been a four-year gap and the world doesn’t stand still,” said Hughes. “It’s interesting how strong China has become in the last four or five years in the international science scene — they’ve really come along fast.”

In order to gain the high ground, all interested countries are racing forward with their technology development. In addition to shrinking the machines used for quantum teleportation to get them aboard satellites, engineers will have to make them usable during all hours. Currently, quantum teleportation experiments only happen at night, because during the day the sun’s light washes out whatever signal researchers are trying to send.

“The greatest challenge in making long-range quantum communication and quantum computing is getting good storage of quantum information,” said Bennett. Since photons are readily absorbed in most materials, it’s difficult to keep them around for much longer than a fraction of a second.

In the meantime, everyone is making sure they stay abreast of the latest developments going on around the world.

“We’re not anxious but definitely keeping our eyes open and talking to the various groups,” said Jennewein. “We have the sense that we have to keep moving if we want to be part of the early game.”

Ursin said that if his Austrian team had the funding, they could develop new experiments in about four or five years. Still, there is a ways to go before people are using quantum teleportation and communication routinely, said Hughes. The technology may feasibly be ready in as little as a decade, but not all new developments are immediately adopted. Cellphones were technically available 40 years ago, but only as unwieldy and relatively powerless devices – it was only in recent times that they became ubiquitous. But others in the field are ready for the next breakthrough.

“For us it’s not a question if these technologies will be used, it’s a matter of when, how, and where will we really use them in everyday life,” said Jennewien.

Images: 1) Schematic of quantum teleportation beaming particles from a satellite to two ground stations. 2) and 3) The Austrian team’s laser beam teleports photons between the Canary Islands of Tenerife and La Palma. IQOQI Wien

Via: "Wired Science"

China’s Secret Satellite Rendezvous

'Suggestive Of A Military Program’

By Katie Drummond
August 31, 2010 | 12:50 pm
Courtesy Of "Wired's Danger Room"

Earlier this month, two Chinese satellites met up in orbit. Depending on who you believe, it’s either a sign of China’s increasingly-sophisticated space program — or a sign of its increasingly-sophisticated space warfare program.

A well-regarded Russian space watcher was the first to note that the two satellites, newly-launched SJ-12 and two-year-old SJ-06F, had performed maneuvers indicating a cutting edge procedure called non-cooperative robotic rendezvous. A loose network of amateur space spectators and astronomers soon congregated online, and confirmed that the sats had, indeed, converged.

This kind of rendezvous can have extremely useful, and benign, applications: removing space debris, refueling satellites or repairing craft in orbit. But the military apps are massive, and include up-close inspection of foreign satellites, espionage — and the infliction of some serious damage to adversarial space infrastructure. In other words, orbital warfare that, given just how reliant we are on satellite technology, would have widespread consequences on the ground.

“These kinds of rendezvous have been done plenty of times with ground control, but robotically controlled satellites, rendezvousing at higher altitudes, is really quite new,” says Brian Weeden, who offers an in-depth rundown of the incident at The Space Review. “The perception of how this technology is being developed, and what it is being used for, is extremely important.”

The United States is the only other country known to have performed a similar feat. In 2005, NASA researchers launched DART (Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology) in an effort to rendezvous with a Navy satellite. Navigational errors led to the two satellites bumping, but the initiative did offer proof-of-concept that American scientists were making major headway towards satellites that can autonomously meet up in space. Since then, the Darpa-funded Orbital Express program has demonstrated the capacity for satellites to rendezvous for refueling and module swapping.

So, in a sense, it was really only a matter of time before China followed suit. In recent years, they’ve fast-tracked a handful of space exploration and development projects, culminating in a satellite-killing weapons program and 90-pound mini-sat that some speculated was designed with nefarious intent.

“The Chinese would be absolutely incompetent to not be trying to reduce U.S advantage in space,” James Oberg, a former NASA space engineer specializing in orbital rendezvous, tells Danger Room. “No potential adversary in their right mind would give us permanent advantage in space operations.”

Weeden notes that neither the United States or Chinese governments have been especially forthcoming about their progress on satellite rendezvous capacities, not to mention respective satellite arsenals and specific locations. The dilemma is even more salient because, as this incident illustrates, knowledgeable amateurs with the right equipment can do their own detective work — and then meet online to share the results.

“There’s a continued assumption among governments that if they don’t publish satellite details and locations, nobody is going to figure it out,” Weeden says. “That’s wrong.”

In this instance, China’s government has yet to acknowledge the incident, and their apparent choice of location for the actual rendezvous adds to the troubling puzzle. According to Oberg, the satellite meet-up occurred in an orbit almost exclusively devoted to earth observation — spy and weather satellites, for example — where “a potential adversary would be most interested in rendezvousing.”

“On the other hand, it’s also where a satellite might need refueling,” he adds. “It’s like you could be changing a screwdriver for a hammer, or you could be turning a peaceful ‘bot into a killer one.”

But China’s been eager to boast about their prior space exploration projects, and have already publicized plans for a major satellite rendezvous trial next year, so silence in this instance seems telling.

“There’s still a vague possibility that this was a matter of computational bias and coincidence,” Oberg says. “But the silence here is suggestive of a military program.”

For now, web-based space watchers will keep working. They’re hoping to figure out whether or not the Chinese satellites touched, which would indicate either an error like that of the DART attempt or some kind of military trial run. Regardless, the rendezvous is a stark reminder that the safety of American deep-space systems is by no means guaranteed.

“For all we know, these could just be mind games. They don’t have to attack U.S space capacities — they just have to make us think they could,” Oberg says. “We’re not playing chess in space, we’re playing Go. This makes chess look like a kindergartner’s pastime.”

See Also:

• Latest Launch Brings China Closer to ‘GPS’ of Its Own
• How China Loses the Coming Space War (Pt. 1)
• Is This China’s Anti-Satellite Laser Weapon Site?
• Space Wars: Chinese Sat-Killer Sparks Turf Battle in U.S.
• China’s Mini-Sat: Orbiting Camera, or New Weapon?
• Refueling Satellite Reaches End of the Line
• Secret Micro-Sat Mission Feeds Space War Worries
• Obama Backs Away from Intergalactic Domination

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