RSVP Required: Please register by Monday, January 6, so that we can provide an accurate count of the number of meals needed. Pay at the door by cash or check.
When?
Wednesday, January 8, 2014 from 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM PST
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Contact
Barbara KeaneyScience & Engineering Council of Santa Barbara
805-566-0598
scieng@silcom.com
Directed Energy Planetary Defense (or Vaporizing Asteroids that Threaten the Earth)
Asteroids and comets crossing Earth’s orbit pose a credible risk of impact, with potentially severe disturbances to society. Numerous mitigation strategies have been proposed, most involving sending spacecraft to the threatening object. Dr. Lubin's group proposes an orbital planetary defense system capable of heating the surface of potentially hazardous objects to the vaporization point. They call the system DE-STAR (for Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation). Dr. Lubin will describe DE-STAR and show results from a laboratory test unit.
DE-STAR has the potential for a number of other applications, including powering ion propulsion systems, active asteroid illumination searches, down-linking power to the Earth via millimeter or microwave, and long range communications. 
http://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/projects/directed-energy-planetary-defense
Speaker: Dr. Phil Lubin, UCSB
Dr. Philip Lubin is a professor of Physics at UCSB. His primary research has been focused on studies of the early universe in the millimeter wavelengths. His group has designed, developed, and fielded more than two dozen ground-based and balloon-borne missions and helped develop two major cosmology satellites. His group first detected horizon scale fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background from their South Pole and balloon-borne systems twenty years ago. Their latest results, along with international teams of ESA and NASA researchers, are from the Planck cosmology mission, which mapped in detail the structures of the early universe. He is co-recipient of the 2006 Gruber Prize in Cosmology along with the COBE science team for their groundbreaking work in cosmology. He has published more than 200 articles.
This meeting is sponsored in part by Community West Bank
For information about the Science & Engineering Council.
visit the SEC web page at http://www.scieng.org
From our Co-Presidents:
Happy New Year! Thank you to all who have renewed their membership for 2014 and made contributions to SEC’s Scholarship Fund. If you have not as yet renewed, please take a moment now and do so. We look forward to seeing you in January for this exciting program and in February for the panel discussion on Technical Employment in Santa Barbara.-- Tim Murphy and Gary Kravetz