![]() “We’ll know fairly soon if we’re successful or not, although analyzing the data in detail will take more time,” he added. If they are successful, the next experiment could be at an airport, Wolf said, and the technology could be ready in a few years. Tests will last until September, the end of lightning season. “It will go from red to white as it propagates in the air. “One interesting thing is that, due to the high peak power, our laser will change color,” said Wolf. ![]() On the mountain, special camera equipment will photograph lightning bolts 300,000 times per second, to see how closely they will follow the laser beam and at which altitude. The laser won’t be switched on all the time, but rather only when increased lightning activity is detected. How a high-tech car helped Lewis Hamilton's brother Nicolas overcome his disability to become a racing driver Although it poses no risk to aircraft, laser is harmful to human eyes when looking directly at the source (looking at the beam from the mountain or from the air while not directly on top of it is fine, says Wolf). The laser shoots 1,000 times per second and it’s so powerful that “a single pulse at peak power is equal to that produced by all the nuclear power plants in the world,” according to Wolf – but only for an extremely short time.įor safety reasons, a five-kilometer wide no-fly zone will be in place when the laser is active. “We get 120 mph winds here, so that was needed to stabilize the structure, or it could easily be shifted or even fly off,” said Wolf.Īssembly took two weeks, and the laser is now ready to be switched on, bad weather permitting – which in this case means hoping for it. P.Walch, LOAĪ total of 29 tons of material were hauled, including 18 tons of concrete blocks to anchor the laser array to its base. The one-year pandemic delay let the team run more tests of the laser in a lab in Paris, pictured here. “It’s a huge laser – it takes a large truck to transport it, which is why it was built like a puzzle, with modules that can be put together on site,” said Wolf. The laser will draw power from the antenna facility, and was brought to the mountaintop disassembled, in a complex operation that involved multiple trips via cable car and helicopter. It adds that the project is expected to lead to safer air transport and reduced flight delays during intense thunderstorms. It says that globally, lightning kills between 6,000 and 24,000 people each year, as well as causing billions of euros of damage to electronics and infrastructure, making it “a major societal concern.” The European Commission is backing the project through an initiative that supports early-stage scientific research. Research also shows that increased lightning strikes could be among the effects of climate change. He added that the demand for lightning protection is vast, and that the costs associated with lightning strikes, especially from air traffic disruption, could be in the billions of dollars each year in the US alone. Paramedics test jet suit that can fly up mountains Lightning forms when turbulent air within a thundercloud violently tosses around ice crystals and water droplets, stripping electrons from their atoms and creating separate zones with opposite electric charges. So it’s an ideal place to make our proof-of-concept experiments.” “There is a radio transmission tower there which gets struck 100 to 400 times a year. “This is one of the places in Europe that’s struck by lightning the most,” explained Wolf. After a year of delays due to the pandemic, the laser has been transported to the summit of Säntis, a mountain in the Swiss alps with an elevation of 2,500 meters (8,200 feet). ![]() He’s leading an EU-funded consortium which includes universities in Paris and Lausanne, as well as rocket manufacturer ArianeGroup and the maker of the laser, German high-tech company Trumpf. Its applications range from cutting diamonds to surgery to reading barcodes, and Wolf believes he can add another to the list: protecting us from lightning. Laser creates very narrow, high-energy beams of light. The team is led by Jean-Pierre Wolf, a Swiss physicist who’s been working with laser for more than 20 years and has been particularly fascinated with attempting to control the weather with it. A team of researchers from the University of Geneva has hauled a huge laser atop a mountain to shoot it at the sky, and act as a high-tech lightning rod.
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