‘Light guiding’ through water and glass

© Mark Ollig

Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation is the definition for the acronym LASER, which should not be confused with the fictional PHASER (phased array pulsed energy projectile weapon) used on the television show “Star Trek.”

Of course, the once fictional technology from “Star Trek” continues to become a reality.

Not long ago, the US military demonstrated a powerful microwave weapon it calls a Phaser, but this is a topic for a future column.

Jean-Daniel Colladon, a Swiss physicist, demonstrated the ability to guide light beyond just a straight line in 1841.

Colladon showed how a ray of light traveling inside a curved arc of flowing water would bend, thus becoming “refracted.”

He called this event “light guiding,” and said it “was one of the most beautiful and most curious experiments that one can perform in a course on optics.”

“By turning the laser light signal on and off quickly, you can transmit the ones and zeros of a digital communications channel,” describes the broadcast use of a laser from my reliable Newton’s Telecom Dictionary.

Laser light encodes the information transmitted using direct modulation through multiplexing laser frequencies; the modulated light guides data through a transparent, fiber-optic glass strand.

The two most common light sources for fiber-optic transmission are LEDs (light-emitting diodes) and laser diodes.

In 1976, AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph) engineers successfully sent information encoded within laser light through a fiber-optic telephone cable installed at AT&T’s research facility in Atlanta, GA.

Also, in 1976, the US Air Force replaced the copper wiring harness from an A-7 Corsair US military fighter jet with a fiber optical link network containing 250 feet of 13 individual fiber-optic cables weighing 3.75 pounds.

The A-7 Corsairs’ previous copper wiring harness included 300 individual copper wire circuits, totaling 4,133 feet and weighing 88 pounds.

Today’s fiber-optics installed in modern aircraft allow military pilots to make instantaneous decisions using high-resolution imaging systems, displays, and flight controls linked with fiber-optic networks providing real-time data.

In 1977, AT&T’s first commercial application of transmitting voice communications over a fiber-optic cable took place in Chicago.

Many believed fiber-optic technology would not reach its data-capability bandwidth ceiling for years to come; however, this is no longer the case.

According to the University of the Witwatersrand, located in Johannesburg, South Africa, the increases in amounts of data used, coupled with the advances in information technology, will have troublesome consequences on the current technology used for providing the bandwidth needed to transport data over fiber-optics.

“Traditional optical communication systems modulate the amplitude, phase, polarization, color, and frequency of the light that is transmitted,” read a statement from the university.

Recently, researchers from this university working in a laboratory created a computer-generated holographic simulation encoded with more than 100 light pattern configurations in multiple colors.

These configurations individually passed through a special liquid crystal combining all the light pattern configurations, acting as a single spatial light modulator or focal point.

Each light configuration pattern was extracted (demultiplexed) and sent to its individually coded destination.

The university’s spatial light modulator experiment demonstrates the expansion possibilities available within the currently-used optical fiber to improve their efficiency in sending voice, video, and data to their destinations.

The following is something previously unknown to the public.

In 1969, NASA secretly used fiber-optic technology during the first Moon landing.

I learned the lunar television camera used by the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon’s surface during July 1969 included fiber-optic technology.

NASA once classified as confidential the fiber-optic technology within its “Lunar Television Camera Pre-installation Acceptance (PIA) Test Plan” document, dated March 12, 1968.

The Aerospace Division at Westinghouse Electric Corporation assisted in developing and manufacturing the 7.3-pound black-and-white Apollo Lunar Television Camera (part number 607R962).

NASA stowed the Apollo 11 lunar surface television camera inside a storage compartment on the lunar module’s (Eagle) descent stage during its mission to the moon.

Apollo 11 is the only moon mission when astronauts would use this camera on the lunar surface.

However, NASA brought the same camera on the Apollo 13, 14, 15, and Apollo 16 missions as a backup if the newer color television cameras onboard encountered a problem.

Back in the day, this old telephone cable splicer was concerned about having enough wired copper pairs to provide a dial tone signal to the phones of the subscribers living miles away from the central telephone office.

Today, engineers and technicians concern themselves with having enough optical fibers to provide sufficient bandwidth to transmit streams of high-speed broadband data over the internet.

NASA’s March 12, 1968 booklet describing the lunar television camera is available at https://go.nasa.gov/2Rzilcd.

Included inside this booklet on page 1 of 10, Section 1.1, titled: Security Classification, is the description: “The fiber optics portion of the camera is classified CONFIFDENTIAL. The camera must be kept in a secured area when not in use.”

Over the last 180 years, we have progressed from Colladon’s “light guiding” through the water to sending terabits per second of light-encoded information through glass strands inside a fiber-optic cable.

What’s next? Stay tuned.

A president’s ‘rapid responses’ via T-Mail

© Mark Ollig

Abraham Lincoln was the first US president who used a communication technology similar to today’s email.

He transmitted and received secretly coded telegraph messages with his generals out on the field during the Civil War.

Telegraph Mail or T-Mail is the term coined by one book author to describe President Lincoln’s use of the telegraph during the Civil War.

In 1857, Abraham Lincoln first encountered the telegraph while visiting the Tazewell House in Pekin, IL.

Lincoln intently watched a young telegraph operator, Charles Tinker, send and receive telegraph messages using the Morse keying device.

Becoming very curious, Lincoln asked Tinker to explain how the telegraph worked. Lincoln learned messages are transmitted using Morse code by pressing interrupted dots and dashes on a telegraph transmission key. A battery powers the key and connects to a telegraph wire attached to poles running for miles to a distant telegraph station operator who receives and decodes the message.

Three years later, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States.

In 1861, the US military’s telegraph office was called “the wire room.”

During the Civil War, President Lincoln spent a significant amount of time in the wire room office overseeing his messages transmitted by telegraph and reading the received telegram messages.

From the wire room, Lincoln telegraphed encouragement to his generals and commanders in the field.

“Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph to Win the Civil War,” is a book written by former Federal Communications Commissioner Chairman Tom Wheeler.

His book reveals many of the “lightning messages,” or telegrams, sent by President Lincoln during the Civil War.

Wheeler explains how Lincoln, wanting to send quick messages or “rapid responses” to his generals out in the field, would spend hours during the day and most nights in the war department’s telegraph office.

Lincoln used the telegraph to supplement his preferred forms of communication; face-to-face meetings and handwritten letters.

The telegraph gave North’s Union Army an advantage because they communicated over telegraph wires much faster than anything else available at the time.

President Lincoln’s messages, converted into electrically transmitted dots and dashes, sped over the telegraph wires to their destinations much quicker than the fastest horse rider could deliver official papers.

Lincoln communicated with the generals on the battlefield in nearly real-time via “mobile telegraph stations.”

Telegraphy was the modern communications technology of the period; Lincoln embraced and capitalized upon it.

His use of the telegraph directly from the White House helped push its development and growth westward across the country.

President Abraham Lincoln was not unfamiliar with technology, as he is the only US president to hold a patent.

Abraham Lincoln received a US patent to lift boats over shallow waters using an expandable floating chamber device under air pressure.

Lincoln obtained US Patent No. 6,469 for “Buoying Vessels Over Shoals,” May 22, 1849. You can see this patent at https://bit.ly/3bBVP9b.

It was in 1838, when Samuel F.B. Morse successfully demonstrated a battery-operated electromagnet telegraph device.

Funds for constructing a telegraph pole line between Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD were granted shortly after Morse’s demonstration.

May 24, 1844, Morse, before members of Congress, keyed this telegraph message, “What hath God wrought?” from the US Capitol in Washington. The statement, sent by wire, was received nearly instantaneously by the telegraph operator located almost 40 miles away at the B&O Railroad station in Baltimore.

An 1853 map detailing the geographic routes of telegraph lines and station depot routes along the eastern United States is viewable on The Library of Congress’s website: https://bit.ly/2jl1sgI.

By October 1861, the US west and east coast telegraph networks became connected.

Although Abraham Lincoln never visited Minnesota, he was the first United States president Minnesotans elected to office.

Lincoln easily won the state of Minnesota’s four electoral votes during the United States presidential elections of 1860 and 1864.

In 1860, Minnesota transmitted its first interstate telegraph message from the state capitol in St. Paul to New York, NY.

The message addressed to the former New York Governor, and current New York US Senator William H. Seward said in part, “we are enabled to send this, the first message ever transmitted by lightning from St. Paul to the East.”

Seward sent the following reply: “You have grappled New York – now lay hold on San Francisco.”

An Aug. 14, 1864, telegraph message President Lincoln sent to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is viewable here: https://bit.ly/2jozd0B.

In 1865, the same military telegraph office where President Abraham Lincoln had spent so many hours reported the news of his assassination.

Personal, political, and Civil War telegraph messages sent and received by President Abraham Lincoln are stored and viewable from the National Archives website: https://bit.ly/2rcnSVo.

Aug. 14, 1864, telegraph message
 President Lincoln sent to
 Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant

Office U.S. Military Telegraph 

WAR DEPARTMENT

Washington, D.C.

 August 14 1864.

Lieut. Genl. Grant

City-Point, Va.

                               

The Secretary of War and I concur that you better confer with Gen. Lee and stipulate for a mutual discontinuance of house-burning--- and other destruction of private property, the time and manner of conference, and particulars of stipulations we leave, on our part, to your convenience and judgement.  

                                                                                                             A. Lincoln    

Space debris surrounds our planet

© Mark Ollig

Today, there are more than 8,800 tons of metal fragments circling Earth.

Non-working satellites and miscellaneous assorted items manufactured on Earth orbit above our planet serving no useful purpose.

This space-clutter, mostly comprised of aluminum, is, in other words, space junk.

NASA defines space debris as “Derelict spacecraft and upper stages of launch vehicles, carriers for multiple payloads, debris intentionally released during spacecraft separation from its launch vehicle or during mission operations, debris created as a result of spacecraft or upper stage explosions or collisions, solid rocket motor effluents, and tiny flecks of paint released by thermal stress or small particle impacts.”

While researching space debris, I was surprised to learn there is such a large amount of it above us.

About 525,000 pieces of space debris measuring three-fourths of an inch to 4 inches are traveling around our planet at 17,500 mph.

There are also more than 100 million marble-sized space debris objects orbiting Earth.

The US Space Surveillance Network currently monitors orbiting space debris larger than 4 inches, and its ground radar is capable of tracking space objects as small as one-tenth of an inch.

I once viewed a photograph of the windshield from a space shuttle damaged by a small piece of space debris.

The surface of the triple-paned glass had a visible shattered impact area with a miniature crater about one-quarter-inch wide.

Within 1,250 miles of our planet’s surface is where most space junk is orbiting; significant debris clusters are inside 500 miles.

What about the International Space Station (ISS) and its vulnerability to being struck by space debris?

The average orbital height of the ISS is 250 miles, which puts it within reach of space debris.

“The ISS is the most heavily shielded spacecraft ever flown,” NASA has reassuringly stated.

NASA said the shielding protecting the ISS crew compartments and high-pressure holding tanks could withstand a space object impact of one-half an inch.

On average, once a year, the ISS needs to use its thruster engines to maneuver away from larger pieces of space debris.

The duration of time in which space debris will orbit around our planet before its eventual re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere varies.

Objects in orbit within 375 miles above Earth will take several years before re-entering the planet’s atmosphere.

An object orbiting around 500 miles above the planet will take decades before its orbit decays and falls back to the surface.

Usually, telecommunication and weather-related satellites are in a 2,200-mile-high orbit from Earth.

Owners of these satellites will maneuver them into a higher orbit toward the end of their useable lifecycle. Sending them further away from Earth diminishes their chance of colliding with and disrupting an operational satellite, not to mention creating more space debris.

Sometimes, not all parts from a spacecraft or satellite burn up when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.

In July 1979, NASA’s Skylab space station, weighing nearly 170,000 pounds, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, scattering debris on Balladonia in western Australia and Nullabor Plain in south Australia. At the time, 1.25 million people were living in the area. There were no reported injuries.

Today, a museum in Esperance, western Australia, displays some of the recovered Skylab debris.

May 8, China’s “Long March 5B” rocket, weighing some 50,000 pounds, descended from Earth orbit and crashed into the Indian Ocean, west of the Maldives islands, where 531,000 people live. Luckily again, there were no reported injuries.

“Decades of space activity have littered Earth’s orbit with debris; and as the world’s space-faring nations continue to increase activities in space, the chance for a collision increases correspondingly,” reads a statement from the National Space Policy of the United States of America.

To get a better perspective on the amount of space debris surrounding our planet, watch this NASA video animation at https://go.nasa.gov/3ezy3wm.

With more satellites orbiting the Earth, the more crowded it will become, which increases the chance of satellite-to-satellite collision resulting in additional space debris.

Some scientists have said they fear the thousands of new satellites launched within the coming years will block ground-based telescope observations of many stars and planets.

Another concern about a dramatic increase in satellite and space debris is how it will adversely affect the radio transmission and reception capacity of NASA’s Deep Space Network to communicate with interplanetary spacecraft missions.

NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office website is http://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov.

You can find the current location of the ISS and when it will be over your area at https://spotthestation.nasa.gov.

Source: NASA

‘How about a nice game of chess?’

© Mark Ollig

On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched its R-7 Semyorka intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) containing Sputnik 1, the first earth-orbiting artificial satellite.

Sputnik 1 caused anxiety among many people worried that the next Soviet ICBM launched over the US might drop a nuclear warhead instead of a harmless beeping satellite.

It was the late 1950s. The Cold War was at its height, and the Soviet Union had taken a commanding lead in this new “Space Race.”

With growing fears of the possible destruction of the US military’s core computer system during a nuclear attack, the US Department of Defense set out to redesign the US military computer communications network.

Feb. 7, 1958, the US Department of Defense Directive 5105.15 officially began the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

This directive initiated a new and highly classified data communications network designed to provide fail-safe remote access to the US military computer system.

To safeguard US military computers’ accessibility during a nuclear attack, ARPA designed a survivable computer communications network named ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

By October 1969, the ARPANET network used data-packet-switching protocol transmissions over dedicated long-distance telephone lines for sharing resources from geographically separated computers across the country.

This specialized communications network would provide multiple redundant connection paths from military computers to the remotely located teletype data terminals used by military personnel.

ARPANET was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the “network of networks,” better known today as the internet.

Eventually, ARPANET connected the US Defense Department with its military computers in the US and Europe.

In 1983, the military’s non-classified information moved from ARPANET to a network called MILnet (Military Network).

MILnet later became NIPRNET (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network) during the 1990s. At the same time, the secret classified information network used by the Department of Defense moved to SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network).

In 1983, a person using their home computer equipped with a dial-up modem and a communications software program accessed another computer by dialing its modem’s telephone number and entering the correct password.

“WarGames” is a 1983 movie about a teenage computer whiz and hacker named David Lightman, who uses his computer and its dial-up modem to call random telephone numbers and track the numbers answering with computer modem “handshaking” protocols.

Lightman is attempting to find the classified telephone number for a specific company’s game computer he wants to play on.

One telephone number Lightman’s computer dials into is the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) top-secret, artificially intelligent computer called WOPR (War Operation Plan Response).

WOPR plays out multiple nuclear attack war game scenarios between the US and the Soviet Union.

Lightman, however, believes WOPR is a gaming computer.

He obtains its secret “backdoor password,” and begins playing WOPR in a war game called Global Thermonuclear War.

Lightman takes the side of the Soviet Union and activates its nuclear forces (not really), while WOPR obtains total control (yes, really) of the US land-based nuclear missiles.

As the game progresses, WOPR prepares a counter-attack against the Soviet Union using real nuclear weapons.

WOPR begins a countdown to launch.

NORAD officials see a “Launch Detection” message (activated by WOPR) on their large, global monitor and believe the Soviet Union is launching nuclear weapons.

NORAD then goes to DEFCON 1 (DEFense readiness CONdition).

Meanwhile, WOPR has armed the US nuclear missiles and is minutes away from obtaining the classified launch code needed to send the missiles in a retaliatory strike.

Going back earlier in the movie, Lightman learned WOPR was playing the game for real but can’t convince the computer to stop playing.

He locates and convinces Professor Stephen Falken, the scientist who programmed the software for WOPR, to come to NORAD and try to stop the launch.

Falken and Lightman get WOPR to play itself in numerous games of Tic-Tac-Toe, which always end in a tie and is therefore unwinnable.

By playing Tic-Tac-Toe, WOPR learns the global thermonuclear war game is also unwinnable.

Just as WOPR obtains the final launch code to fire the nuclear missiles, it suddenly stops the Global Thermonuclear War game and suggests, “How about a nice game of chess?” to be played instead.

In 1985, two years after the fictional “War Games” movie, seven New Jersey teenagers played the fictional film out for real.

Using their home computers, these teens accessed US government computers containing classified codes, telephone numbers, credit card information, and other data used by US Pentagon generals.

Somehow, the teen hackers reprogramed and changed the orbital position of US earth-orbiting satellites, resulting in the disruption of telephone communications between two continents.

The seven teens were eventually arrested and charged by agents from the US Government.

You can read the July 17, 1985 newspaper article about the teen hackers at https://bit.ly/3xDzK3H.

I was thinking of watching “War Games” again. The last time I watched this movie was when it was on a VHS (video home system) tape cassette.

On the other hand, I might instead prefer a nice game of chess.