Can someone tell me what Starfish Prime was and its purpose which I read on Cosmic Dave's site?

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~AstroMike

The Starfish Prime explosion tested the ABM capabilities of a nuclear device, re-entry vehicle tracking capabilities, the effects of EMP from high-altitude explosions, and the feasibility of nuclear testing in space. It used a 1.4 megaton device detonated at an altitude of 400 km, carried aloft by a Thor rocket in 1962.

The only people who are claiming the "real" purpose of the test was to blast a hole in the Van Allen belts are the conspiracists. No scientists or engineers agree with this. That's because scientists and engineers know what the Van Allen belts are and how they're formed. They also know how nuclear warheads behave in space.

In atmospheric nuclear detonations, the atmosphere has a radiant and mechanical effect which produces high detonation field temperatures and a pronounced shock wave. In high-altitude (i.e., orbital) nuclear detonations, the x-rays are not focused and do not therefore reflect back into the fireball to increase the temperature. In short, space detonations of nuclear weapons are "cooler" and "gentler" than detonations in an atmosphere. A nuclear weapon would have little effect on the Van Allen belts.

Further, the Van Allen belt particles arrive from outside, from the sun. Even if it were possible to "blast" a hole in the Van Allen belts, it would have refilled on its own in a matter of minutes. There is simply no justification for the notion that NASA was trying to find a way through the Van Allen belts via this method. Basically the answer is that scientists would have known better. And this isn't the "cover story," this is alleged to be the real covert purpose. Scientists don't do (or appear to do) dumb things in the covert operation.

There is, however, some truth to the notion that the detonation increased the radiation level in the lower Van Allen belts. The effects lingered longer than expected. It did not create a "new" Van Allen belt, and the augmented effects were not orders of magnitude greater than the ambient.

As with most of "Cosmic" Dave Cosnette's site, it's 1% truth wrapped in layers and layers of conjecture and unfounded insinuation.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Sounds to me like yet another instance of the magical nukular bogeyman. Wanna get rid of something, no matter how big? Nukular bombs will do it. But since we all know how dangerous and deadly radiation is, it's not surprising that it comes back to bite us in the end.

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...And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped. --Sir Bedevere

Well it was either that or reversing the polarity on the main deflector dish.

Aporetic
www.polisci.wisc.edu/~rdparrish

This scenario was part of the plot for Buzz Aldrin's last fiction work "The Return."

A very large (32+ Meg) PDF file dealing with 'Operation Dominic I' the nuclear test series Starfish Prime was part of can be found at:

http://www.dtra.mil/td/ntpr/td_ntprvol.html

Pictures of the Starfish Prime test can be found at:

http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew...s/Dominic.html

Hope the information is of use.

Even reversing the deflector polarity would have limited results. The Van Allen belts are essentially trapped flux. It's sort of like saying you can clear a path through a whirlpool with a rake. Sure, the rake will have some effect, and may disrupt the flow for a brief period, but all the water is still there. The rake won't remove any of it.

If you know why a nuclear explosion forms a mushroom cloud then you'll know why Dave's theory simply doesn't work. The detonation pushes the air outward -- first in a shock wave, and then in a standard thermal expansion. But air is elastic. You push it outward, and it pushes back inward a short time later. As the air meets and collides, it goes up because that's the only direction left to go. This lifts the cloud upward and "roils" it inward at the bottom.

A similar thing would happen in the Van Allen belts. As soon as a "hole" opened, it would last only as long as the pressure from the detonation held it that way. Then it would snap back to equilibrium, producing a sort of toroidal three-dimensional "mushroom cloud" in the particle flux.

Starfish Prime was one of the last tests before the test ban treaty. All these tests were primarly focused toward how to use nuclear explosions as weapons. Sure: drop it on the target. We already had that one pretty much figured out. But tests determined optimal burst altitude for a precursor. Starfish Prime tested whether a nuclear explosion could be used to destroy incoming missiles in ABM fashion (not really), and whether the EMP resulting from a high-altitude burst could selectively target certain types of electronic equipment (nope), and whether we could really track incoming ICBM warheads accurately enough (yes).

I went back to check Dark Moon. Bennett and Percy discuss the Starfish Prime detonation on pp. 308-310. I'll review that in a separate message. But they don't argue in that section that the purpose of Starfish Prime was to blow a hole in the Van Allen belts. That appears to be Dave Cosnette's conclusion. Bennett and Percy, on the other hand, seem to argue that the lingering effects of trapped electrons produced by the detonation would have been a serious radiation hazard. Which sort of defeats "Cosmic" Dave's theory.

It would be nice to find a good use for nuclear explosions. They don't seem to be very useful as weapons, at least in a gentleman's army.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Mary Bennett and David Percy, Dark Moon, pp. 308-310.

The first paragraph of Bennett's and Percy's explanation of the "Starfish Prime" explosion is a condemnation of the event itself. While the authors are certainly entitled to their opinion -- and many would share it -- this dig is largely irrelevant to the point they're trying to make. In this context it's simply sensationalism. They're trying to amplify the negative impression of the effects of this test. The authors have a vested interest in making the consequences seem as dire as they can.

They then describe the test itself and list some of its effects: satellite damage, EMP effects, and so forth.

I have to admit I don't fully understand what "radiant decay" is supposed to mean, and I suspect neither do the authors. Unlike the authors, I consulted a couple of textbooks on radiometry and radioactivity without finding any substantive mention of "radiant decay". A web search turns up that it's a popular Nine Inch Nails song, and that's about it. I'll have lunch this afternoon with a physicist and find out. It's definitely not something we worry about when building spacecraft to go through the Van Allen belts.

The authors claim a new radiation belt was created inside the innermost Van Allen belt, which is true enough. But the authors claim this new belt "had an intensity over a hundred times greater than any of the naturally existing radiation belts." (p. 309, emphasis original) This rings all kinds of warning bells, first because no reference is given for this claim, and second because "intensity" can mean many things for radiation -- especially charged particles like the electrons produced in the detonation. Even the basis of comparison is ambiguous because there are two main Van Allen belts and the radiation levels differ greatly between them, and even within individual belts the radiation amount varies from time to time and location to location.

Finally, and inexplicably, the authors jump into a discussion of radioactive half-life as an indication of how intense this radiation would be during the Apollo missions and today. Their simplistic application of the principles of radioactive decay ("radiant decay"?) leads them to conclude that even today the intensity of this belt is 25 to 50 times greater than the Van Allen belt ambient.

The authors seem completely ignorant of the fact that half-life, as a feature of radioactive decay, is relevant only to isotopes and has nothing whatsoever to do with magnetically retained clouds of high-energy electrons. It's literally like trying to apply principles of gardening to cooking. Their source, Davidson's Radiation (1986), is a general introductory textbook. The authors here make it sound as if Dr. Davidson has computed these decay rates. In fact Dr. Davidson only explains in basic terms the concept of half-life, and the authors Bennett and Percy misapply it to their question.

But most egregiously this finding is contradicted by the data the authors report four inches to the left on the same page, quoted above. Only two years after the detonation, radio noise is expected to have dropped to 10% (although this is a product of ionospheric interruption, which the authors don't appear to understand), while Bennett and Percy give the "half-life" of this artificial radiation belt as 20 years.

The "decay" of this artificial belt has nothing to do with isotopic half-life and everything to do with solar weather and the shifting of the earth's magnetic field. The belt "decays" in the sense that the particles disperse in the shifting fields, and are knocked out in the constant renewal of particles from the sun. And the particles simply lose energy after a time. It's not unlike the annual Chicago tradition of dyeing the river green for St. Patrick's day. The effect is cataclysmic and spectacular, and somewhat persistent, but ultimately temporary.

Their parting shot is to allude to Sir Patrick Moore discussing the artificial Van Allen belt in 1996, as if to confirm the authors' conclusion that this "intense" radiation belt is still there and still as dangerous as they say it is. However, Moore's work Exploring the Earth and Moon is a history. Moore is talking about the belt in its historical context as something that was created in 1962 and gradually dissipated over time.

As with all arguments having to do with cislunar radiation, there simply is no hiding it. NASA can't just make up whatever story it wants about what's out there, because there are ways for people to know about it. If there were still a "third" Van Allen belt out there, many times more intense than the existing ones, and inside the formerly innermost belt, there would simply be no hiding it. Bennett and Percy have done more to perpetuate the "existence" of this belt than the Starfish Prime explosion ever could have.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

OK thanks Jay and others.

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~AstroMike

Sounds like they may have confused Starfish Prime with Operation Argus, which was a nuclear test series designed to create an artificial Van Allen Belt.

See this link for info:

http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew...sts/Argus.html

They discuss project Argus and list Starfish Prime as a retry of it, which is not entirely accurate.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Thanks for all the info, guys. I saw the effects of this explosion in our night sky from my home here in New Zealand and it was very scary to a 13-year-old to see something that was set off thousands of miles away. I have an 11-page file of newspaper clippings from the time -- anyone is welcome to copies. Back then, we couldn't find out much about it.

A few quotes:


Telephone, telegraph and telex services between Australia and Vancouver, Canada, "went out like a light" for 10 minutes after the test, a spokesman for the Overseas Telecommunications Commission said in Sydney tonight. Services between Australia and Honolulu and San Francisco were also interrupted. The Australia-London service was affected for four minutes, the spokesman said. "’Frisco went out, then fluttered for 10 minutes," he added. He said signals on all circuits were still "a bit weak" 40 minutes after the explosion.



DUNEDIN.-- The brilliant artificial aurora sent instruments right off the scale at the DSIR auroral station in Lauder, Central Otago. Scientists at the station listened to the test’s count-down. The rocket lifted off at 8:48pm New Zealand time, and immediately after the explosion -- at 9-1/2 seconds after 9pm -- needles and dials went crazy. The strength of the explosion far exceeded their expectations.

Dr M Gadsden, a scientist at the station and a world authority on the aurora, said he had been expecting a "slight twitch" on the delicate recording devices.

Scientists at the auroral station said they thought the big nuclear explosion took place at a height of more than 1400 miles, seven times higher than announced. Dr Gadsden said this was only a preliminary calculation on the data available. He said the time from take-off to explosion would tie in with the flight of the rocket to an altitude of about 1400 to 1500 miles and would account for the South Island sightings of the aurora.

LEVIN.-- A huge ribbon of crimson edged with white slashed a fiery trail across the blackened sky tonight in one of the most brilliant displays seen in Levin for many years. The display was clearly reflected in the snow-clad tops of the Tararua Ranges and made a brilliant spectacle which attracted scores of people out of doors into the cold night.

NELSON.-- A brilliant and extensive red glow was seen for a few minutes in Nelson’s eastern sky with shafts of light reaching to the zenith and extending into the southern heavens. It was redder than the fiery red of the sunrise and extended over a broad belt of the sky. The colour seemed to be much more vivid than usually occurs with displays of the Aurora Australis in Nelson.



The Unites States Atomic Energy Commission would not comment tonight on the statement by Dr M Gadsden, of the auroral station in Central Otago, that the blast had occurred at 1400 miles. An altitude of "hundreds of kilometres" was the official statement.



Thought there was a fire

One result of the nuclear explosion over Johnston Island in the Pacific last night was that one machine from the Lower Hutt Fire Brigade attended a call to the Normandale Hills at 9.12. The justifiable false alarm had been given by Normandale residents who had mistaken the nuclear flash for a fire.'

Operation Argus, was a 1958 secret nuclear test program designed to create an artificial Van Allen belt, to that end three warheads fired from the South Atlantic were detonated at high altitude. The program was apparently successful. (Source High Energy Weapons Archive)

During the same year the US conducted a Pacific based test series codenamed Hardt(r?)ack I two high altitude tests were conducted from Johnston Island to test the effects of high altitude nuclear detonations on radio and radar.

Finally in 1962 the US carried out its final atmospheric test series, codenamed Dominic I, this was a 'grab bag' of various tests that had been planned in the late 1950's but not carried out due to the moritorium on such testing that lasted between November 1958 and September 1961. Tests included weapons development trials, proof firing (Operations Frigate Bird and Swordfish) and Operation Fishbowl a series of high altitude detonations that were presumably intended to extend upon the results gathered during Operation Hardt(r?)ack I.

The Defence Nuclear Agency report (See my earlier post for a link to a download site) gives the following information about the objectives of Fishbowl.



The first succesful shot (Starfish Prime), aside from creating a spectacular auroral display also:

These trapped electrons caused the failure of several satelites in the days following Starfish Prime as the electrons destroyed the satelites solar panels causing them to lose power.

None of the other succesful shots in Operation Fishbowl are recorded as having the same effects

Here's a nice article that about some possible effects of these projects.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/materials-01c.html

Operation Argus, was a 1958 secret nuclear test program designed to create an artificial Van Allen belt ...

You might (and should) ask why anyone would want to do this. The goal was a kind of missile net that would disrupt incoming Soviet missiles.

During the same year the US conducted a Pacific based test series codenamed Hardt(r?)ack ...

HARDTACK.

I watched Trinity and Beyond over the weekend. There are some great shots of the Starfish Prime detonation, and one of the Starfish (aborted) attempt, whose Thor rocket failed. The warhead was destroyed by a range-safety non-fission detonation.

Measurements were made of the effects of the detonations on the ionosphere and its ability to support radiofrequency propagation ...

Again, hoping to throw a Soviet attack into disarray by eliminating their long-range radio transmission capability.

These trapped electrons caused the failure of several satelites in the days following Starfish Prime as the electrons destroyed the satelites solar panels causing them to lose power.

Correct. Today we would see these tests as not very smart. And that's probably why they were eventually banned. However at the height of the Cold War they were important to see if we would survive a nuclear war.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

I saw this as a 12 year old from Honolulu. How could I get some copies of the event as you suggested????

In the light of some Apollo hoax theorists claims that satellites can operate in the van Allen belts because they are not damaged by radiation, it's worth noting that the new belt from Starfish damaged several satellites, including the first commercial communications satellite, Telstar 1, the Ariel 1 scientific satellite with a set of instruments from the UK, and some of the US Navy's early navigation satellites.

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"The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head" Terry Pratchett

I watched Trinity and Beyond over the weekend. There are some great shots of the Starfish Prime detonation, and one of the Starfish (aborted) attempt, whose Thor rocket failed. The warhead was destroyed by a range-safety non-fission detonation.


The fun-lovin' folks who made Trinity and Beyond made a number of other films, including Nukes in Space, which covers both high-altitude testing and the development of the ICBM. I've seen (and own) all of these films, and they are quite fascinating.

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery