Kevin Cain, Digital Capture Supervisor for Maya Skies, demonstrates his innovative image-capture process that replaces expensive custom hardware with affordable consumer equipment.On this week’s TV episode of QUEST, we go behind the scenes of Tales of Maya Skies, the new film produced by Oakland’s Chabot Space and Science Center.  The half-hour film about Maya astronomy opens at the center’s planetarium on November 21.

The film is groundbreaking for a couple of reasons.  It’s the first time the Chabot center is using state-of-the art laser scanning technology to create one of its films.  For Tales of Maya Skies, a team of 25 people spent seven weeks scanning the ruins of the ancient city of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.  This technology is widely used by Hollywood productions because of the flexibility it gives a creative team.  Once they’ve scanned a particular site, they can play with any one of its variables: they can create the illusion that the camera is moving in crazy ways; they can manipulate the light conditions, and they can change the look of the location in any way they want.

The creative team behind Tales of Maya Skies, made up of, among others, Emeryville nonprofit Insight, the San Francisco animation companies Digitrove and Palma VFX, the ARTS Lab at the University of New Mexico, producer Konda Mason and director Jin An Wong, are taking advantage of all the possibilities that the scanning of Chichén Itzá provides.  The audience will be immersed in full-color animations that go beyond showing the ruins of Chichén Itzá as they exist today.  Instead, through laborious historical research, the creative team has reconstructed what the monumental city must have looked like at its peak 1,200 years ago, with temples painted in bright reds, greens, blues and yellows, and incense burning and flags waving atop them.

By using the 3-D digital images created through laser scanners as the raw material for the animations in Tales of Maya Skies, the film is also breaking ground in more indirect, but perhaps even more important, ways.  Insight, the Emeryville nonprofit that oversaw the scanning at Chichén Itzá, as well as the Orinda-based CyArk, another nonprofit that worked on the project, are engaged in scanning irreplaceable sites around the world, documenting them for the benefit of the archaeologists charged with preserving them, as well as for generations to come, which might lose the real thing to natural disasters, war, or the passage of time.  CyArk’s co-founder, Ben Kacyra, has set out to use laser scanners to document 500 sites in five years.

But laser scanners, for all the wonderful detail, speed and flexibility they offer, are expensive.  They can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000.  That’s why Kevin Cain, Insight’s director, has been testing an alternative system that can accomplish the same thing at a fraction of the cost. All the gear he needs is a digital camera, a flash and software, at a total cost of under $2,000.  Here’s how it works.  For every 32-square-foot swatch of an object, Cain takes 10 still photos with his camera and flash.  Then he uses the photos to reconstruct the object based on the brightness of each individual point on its surface.  The system is based on a principle of physics discovered in the 18^th century.  The high quality of today’s cheap digital cameras is what makes it possible to apply this principle to create an inexpensive image-capturing system.

“With this new technique, our ultimate goal is to be able to provide very low-cost, very usable results for archaeologists,” Cain said, “because until the price goes almost to zero, archaeologists aren’t going to be able to adopt it, just given the realities of their field.”  To illustrate those realities, Cain used the example of the work that Insight has done in Egypt for the past decade.  Each year they join a team of archaeologists for their field work at the Tomb of Ramses.  A complete yearly field season costs under $50,000, many times the cost of an inexpensive laser scanner.

This past Friday, a few thousand folks attended Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to see dignitaries including California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein dedicated the world's newest and most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility (NIF).

Governor Schwarzenegger, clad in a pink tie– an odd sartorial choice for dedicating this giant hulk of a building housing 500 trillion watt laser housed within– nevertheless succeeded in channeling at least some of his Hollywood days. When they originally visited the facility last November, "we were so excited that we said, 'We'll be back.'"

The project's goal is to focus 192 laser beams onto a BB-sized capsule of hydrogen fuel in order to heat it to the point of ignition, that is, to achieve a nuclear fusion reaction where more energy comes out of the capsule than is put in. Fusion is the common process for creating energy in the Sun, and has been demonstrated on Earth both in the apocalyptic specter of thermonuclear weapons and in the more hope-inspiring form of plasma reactors such as those at the Joint European Torus (JET) in Britain. However, ignition has yet to be demonstrated, as JET requires a constant influx of energy greater than anything it is capable of producing. If all goes well within the next several months, ignition could be achieved at NIF as early as 2010.

For all of these exciting aspirations and promise of new technology, the press' reaction to NIF throughout the twelve years of its construction has been often lukewarm, and at worst scornful. Some of this has been deserved, and it is certainly true that the facility's $3.5 billion dollar construction cost is a hard price tag to swallow.

However, NIF is a worthy scientific cause and might well turn out to be an excellent investment. To put things a little bit into perspective, other large science projects are similarly expensive. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Hubble Space Telescope have both been estimated at about $6 billion. Dianne Feinstein argued in the past (and reminded the audience at Friday's dedication) that Enron needlessly cost $9 billion during the California Energy Crisis. Put another way, with $9 billion you could (a) experience rolling blackouts while Enron power traders cheer for wildfires ravaging your countryside, or (b) assemble the world's most powerful laser and use it to bring the nation to the brink of being able to replicate, in a controlled manner, the sorts of reactions that power the Sun. Twice.

The physics promise of the NIF, meanwhile, is truly fascinating on all three fronts of NIF's stated goals: energy production, basic research, and national security.

Fission reactors, which extract atomic energy from the splitting of large atoms such as uranium, have been a viable source of energy since 1954. However, the waste they produce remains radioactive for thousands of years. Potential fusion plants, on the other hand, would operate by an altogether different mechanism: the merging of much smaller hydrogen atoms. Radioactive byproducts are still generated, but the timescale for their radioactivity is shorter, on the order of 10 to 20 years.

A significant line of inquiry has already been pursued toward commercially viable nuclear fusion at JET and its planned successor, ITER. Such experiments employ powerful magnetic fields to maintain hydrogen plasma in a confined space and heat it to the point of fusion as it soars around inside a doughnut-shaped ring.

NIF serves as a valuable compliment to these magnetic confinement experiments. Instead of forcing a fusion reaction to perpetuate using costly magnetic fields, the NIF laser will attempt to blast its fuel with so much energy in such a short time period that the fuel will have no time to expand before it undergoes fusion. "If it works, developments at NIF would entirely reshape the dialogue on nuclear fusion energy," said Brian MacGowan, a NIF Program Director.

Even the most optimistic estimates place the viability of these types of energy sources 20 years into the future. NIF itself will never be able to function as a power generator even if all experiments performed at the facility proceed exactly as planned. The raw potential for such power extraction is nevertheless tantalizing.

Additionally, there is basic research potential for NIF beyond fusion power. Stars are typically easy to observe from a distance but inevitably too far away and too inhospitable to explore up close. A miniaturized version of the reaction as created in the NIF target bay could provide an interesting model system. There is no way to tell, but it could be that hand in hand with this ability comes a better understanding of some of the deepest outstanding questions in physics as well, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

NIF also offers a unique way for the U.S. to test the effects of nuclear weapons without violating the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. NNSA Administrator Tom D'Agostino noted at the dedication that, particularly as the United States' nuclear arsenal ages, this will provide the U.S. with invaluable data.

We may emerge from this economic crisis a poorer, humbler country. Still, I hope that we are not yet so humble that we have lost the ability to dream big, and not yet so poor that we can no longer actively pursue at least a few of those dreams.

Last year, QUEST visited the largest laser beam in world: The National Ignition Facility in Livermore. The goal is to create fusion energy, a potentially clean & sustainable source of energy. After $3.5 billion and a decade of work, that facility is now ready to fire up. Experiments are expected to begin in April as the laser continues to "warm up". The fusion experiment will most likely not happen until 2010, when the laser has achieved enough power.

In celebration of the operational launch of the NIF, engineers & scientists from the facility are presenting a series of talks and discussions geared for the general public.

Monday 4/20

Ed Moses, Principal Associate Director, NIF at Down to a Science in San Francisco

Tuesday 5/12

Ed Moses, Principal Associate Director, NIF at Café Scientifique Silicon Valley

Thursday 6/4

Richard Boyd, Science Director, NIF at Science Buzz Café in Sebastopol

Tuesday 6/9

Jeffery F. Latkowski, Chief Engineer for the Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy (LIFE) program at Ask a Scientist in San Francisco

Inside the National Ignition Facility. Lawrence Livermore National Lab is building the world's largest laser. Actually, the National Ignition Facility won't have only one laser beam. It will use 192 world-class lasers, all firing simultaneously. In a few billionths of a second about 500 trillion watts, which is nearly 1000 times the power generated in the entire US at any moment, will hit a target the size of a dime. The hope is that this will create enough heat and pressure to mimic the core of the sun and achieve a fusion ignition.

So in a nutshell, what is fusion? And how do lasers work? Why are you asking me? I was the kid who always struggled with math and would get hives on the eve of a high school science test.

Luckily, there are some darn good teachers out there and we were fortunate enough to feature one of them in our story. Richard Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California and has also become something of a web phenomenon. Thousands of "students" all over the world have viewed his lecture series titled "Physics for Future Presidents" on YouTube and Cal's own website.

Muller designed this class to "stress conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events." As he told us, "imagine looking out on your classroom and picturing out there is the future president of the United States. What do you want that person to know?" What comes out is an explanation of the physics of energy, nuclear weapons, radioactivity, relativity and the universe– all explained in a way that the physics-challenged, like myself or maybe a future president, can understand.

Watch the "Super Laser at the National Ignition Facility" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Chris Bauer is a Segment Producer for television on QUEST.

It's one of the most expensive high-tech projects the United States has ever attempted, and some say it will never work. QUEST visits the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, where scientists will soon aim the world's largest laser at a target the size of a pencil eraser. The goal? Nuclear fusion — and, they say, the answer to the world's clean energy needs.

You may listen to the "Super Laser" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also don't miss our behind-the-scenes photos for this report.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

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