GRAND FORKS — The University of North Dakota is hoping to give its students hands-on experience with “out of this world” technology.
Next year, students will be using lasers to talk to satellites.
It was an exciting day at UND on Wednesday, Dec. 10, as a new telescope was hoisted onto the roof of Witmer Hall, but it’s not for looking through. The telescope will be used to shoot lasers into space, lasers that will end up transmitting data.
“You need to make light and encode light in the shapes or timing of optical pulses you send,” said Markus Allgaier, physics and astrophysics assistant professor.
Those pulses of light act like a laser Morse code and are much more efficient than radio frequencies.
“We can time these events of counting photons down to about 100 picoseconds. So a picosecond is 1,000,000,000,000th of a second,” Allgaier said.
Cullen Holt / WDAY News
This new technology could send back real-time video from space missions or help satellites relay important information.
“Some of the possibly important data that’s being collected has to be tossed out on orbit because there’s no way to download it all. So we’ll be seeing a lot more data, for example, for agriculture and weather forecasting,” Allgaier said.
But UND’s campus won’t be looking like a laser light show anytime soon.
“Those longer wavelengths don’t actually make it to the sensitive parts of our eyes, to the retina,” Allgaier said.
The whole setup cost about $5 million and was funded by state and federal money.
And with the Space Development Agency setting up shop at Grand Forks Air Force Base, UND students could be light years ahead in the job market.
“I can say with confidence that this will be the first civilian ground station that can use the standard that the Space Development Agency has published,” Allgaier said.
And if all that technical information is too complicated, Allgaier says you should still care.
“Because space lasers are cool,” Allgaier said.
Because the lasers are invisible to the eye, they will not affect flights out of Grand Forks Airport or the air base.
Cullen Holt is a sports anchor and reporter for WDAY News, while handling play-by-play duties for high school and select college sports.