Heliostats that harness sunlight by day could help detect asteroids by night, offering the U.S. a scalable planetary defense solution.
A scientist at Sandia National Laboratories is exploring an unconventional way to detect asteroids after dark, by turning solar power mirrors into nighttime surveillance tools. John Sandusky believes heliostats, which normally reflect sunlight to generate electricity, could be repurposed to detect faint light reflected off near-Earth objects, helping spot potential threats before they strike.
“The heliostat fields don’t have a night job. They just sit there unused. The nation has an opportunity to give them a night job at a relatively low cost for finding near-Earth objects,” Sandusky said. “If we knew ahead of time that an asteroid was coming and where it might hit, we’d have a better chance to prepare and reduce the potential damage.”Repurposing mirrors for the darkHeliostats typically sit idle after sunset, but Sandusky saw untapped potential.Using the National Solar Thermal Test Facility’s field of 212 heliostats, he ran nighttime experiments under a Laboratory Directed Research and Development project.Instead of using the mirrors to gather sunlight, Sandusky directed them to detect femtowatts, a millionth of a billionth of a watt of light reflected from asteroids.“Solar towers collect a million watts of sunlight,” he said. “At night, we want to collect a femtowatt, which is a millionth of a billionth of a watt of power of sunlight that’s scattered off of asteroids.”Unlike observatory-grade telescopes that rely on long-exposure images to find asteroid streaks, Sandusky’s method focuses on measuring an asteroid’s speed relative to stars. That shift in method could save both time and money.Scientist John Sandusky stands among the heliostats at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility. Credit – Craig Fritz/Sandia National LaboratoriesHe used standard optical instruments and existing software to make the heliostat sweep slowly back and forth once every minute. “We changed the direction the heliostat was pointing gradually so it would sweep back and forth about once per minute,” he said.Each night, he climbed to the top of the solar tower, about 200 feet high, to monitor the setup. “You spend a lot of time waiting. There were about 20 minutes between the collection of data points. I would collect data until dawn,” he said.While the aim wasn’t to detect an asteroid just yet, the test confirmed that the heliostat could track stars effectively. “We did not set out to find asteroids. We demonstrated the heliostat can be swept back and forth and that it can see stars,” Sandusky said.Low-cost potential and future useBeyond asteroid detection, Sandusky sees potential applications in defense. He noted that the system might support the U.S. Space Force in tracking spacecraft in cislunar space, an area near the Moon that’s challenging to monitor from Earth. “It may help the U.S. Space Force with its job of trying to find spacecraft, especially in the cislunar area. Orbits near the moon can be difficult to track from the ground,” he said.He presented his results at a conference hosted by the International Society for Optics and Photonics and published a research paper. For now, he’s looking for feedback to refine the method further. “We want to hear from our peers in optics and the asteroid hunting community,” he said. “Getting peer feedback provides an opportunity to understand what the concerns are about how this technology will work.”The next step could involve using the system to track a known planet to test precision. Eventually, Sandusky hopes to scale the system across multiple heliostats and detect smaller objects.“We’re looking for opportunities to scale up from one heliostat to many and try to demonstrate that we can help find near-Earth objects,” he said. “We also want to demonstrate we can scale up the technology to detect even smaller asteroids.”Sandusky presented his findings at an optics conference, with a paper published in Unconventional Imaging, Sensing, and Adaptive Optics 2024.
Heliostat John Sandusky Near-Earth Objects Planetary Defense Sandia National Laboratories Solar Mirrors Space Surveillance
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