Lightning can now be side-tracked using a giant laser
Last year, NASA had to postpone its lunar mission Artemis 1. During the time of its scheduled launch, the Florida weather acted as the culprit with severe storms, accompanied by rain, thunder and lightning. In fact, as the rocket waited in the launch pad, the launch zone was hit by lightning not once but four times. Luckily, NASA had the lightning towers in place to shield from the destruction of the lightning.
For those unaware, lightning tower refers to the tower-like structure made with giant metals that are specifically designed to attract lightning and safely carry the electric charge to the ground, without burning anything in the vicinity. While lightning tower dates back to the 18th century, research in the field has continued till date.
For instance, Switzerland based scientists had initiated a project to find an alternative of lightning tower, something similar but more effective. This was in the year 2021. Now, two years later, they have finally come up with a fast-pulsing gigantic laser that is about the size of a car. In fact, it was only recently that they had its maiden trial run and was installed next to a telecommunications tower on top of the Santis Mountains, at a height of 8000 feet. This experiment was a success as it was able to divert lightning from the telecom tower. This was published in the journal Nature Photonics.
The laser is a picosecond one, meaning it fires nearly 1000 pulses per second and can operate more than 6 hours at a stretch during heavy thunderstorm. Anyhow, during the trial run, the telecom tower was hit four times, and all of them were prevented by the laser. In fact, during one of the instances, high-speed cameras installed at site even got to capture the lightning strike and its eventual diversion by the laser, almost 50 metres away into the ground. The enormous laser is so powerful that it also measured electromagnetic waves, almost like a VHF interferometer does. It also conducted X-Ray measurements at the site for further analysis.
What’s interesting here is that, earlier too, different teams of researchers had tried to use lasers to steer lightning, once in 2004 and later in 2011. However, both of these attempts were a failure. Wondering why? Well, experts state that back them the lasers weren’t this powerful, meaning, they weren’t this fast-paced and didn’t emit 1000 pulses per second. As a result, they couldn’t really intercept the lightning before it struck. Moreover, half of the lightnings are often downward striking and are hard to side-track, but the ones on the Santis Mountains were upward striking and could easily be re-directed.
So, as you can understand, with 40 to 120 lightning strikes occurring almost every second around the world, this laser will come in handy to prevent both human injury as well as infrastructure.