RE: starship-design: Massively Distributed Computing for SETI

[Zenon Kulpa <zkulpa@ippt.gov.pl>]

> From owner-starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu Sun Mar 18 17:16:34 2001
> From: "L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>
> 
> >   E.g., a 100-kilometer diameter microvawe dish
> >   tilted by only 1 mm (1/25th of an inch) at the edge, sweeps the beam
> >   at 1 ly distance by 100 000 (one HUNDRED thousand) kilometers!
> >   (i.e., almost one-third of the Earth-Moon distance)
> >
> >    I am afraid that such deflections are easily obtainable
> >   by heat distortions of the structure or gravitational perturbation
> >   from an asteroid flying some million kilometers away...
> 
> Well it is obvious from what you just presented that a dish is out of the
> question. A phased array however is quite a different matter.
> 
> Assuming that we are looking at a microwave beam as opposed to a laser, 
> then we would only have to electronically steer the beam to correct for
> movement - as well as heat distortions, gravitational perturbations, etc.,
> which also implies some sort of feedback loop to measure such things.
> 
Which seems also a quite nontrivial task, as the accuracies 
must be very high, and the phased array will probably have 
to be quite huge...

-- Zenon Kulpa