Sandia National Laboratories scientist puts asteroid detection method to testChad Brummett
KRQE AlbuquerqueTue, August 19, 2025 at 6:35 PM EDT
3 min read
Sandia National Laboratories scientist puts asteroid detection method to testNEW MEXICO (KRQE) — Across the globe, technology that is designed to generate solar energy could potentially be employed for yet another planet-saving enterprise: Asteroid detection. One scientist at Sandia National Labs has started to get the ball rolling on a theory using a large-scale mirror, and a bit of ingenuity and hope.
Sitting just south of Albuquerque is a field of more than 200 large-scale mirrors. These heliostats focus the immense power of the sun on to a 200-foot tower, collecting as much as a million watts of power during the day, but at night, they don’t have a job — they’re just waiting for the sun to rise again.
Sandia National Laboratories Scientist John Sandusky came up with the novel idea of employing these instruments after hours. “They collect an enormous quantity of light at night,” said Sandusky. “If we could adapt these facilities to collect light from the night sky, I might be able to spot an asteroid. The advantage being that they collect much more light than an astronomical observatory would.”
Scientists and astronomers world wide all agree that early detection of an asteroid is key in preventing a disastrous collision with the earth. And Sandusky’s idea is that Sandia’s sea of heliostats could add yet another tool in global detection. “The approach that I’m using, is not imaging, but instead it is looking for angular rate,” said Sandusky. “And how what I do is, sweep the helios stats back and forth against the stars as the goal being to, generate a repeating pattern that belongs to the stars, that becomes one tone and the photocurrent and, anything moving along the stars along the direction of the sweep will clear and slightly shifted frequency.”
Sandusky tested this idea using just one of Sandia’s heliostats. Over the course of the night, the heliostat would sweep the sky and deliver data points every 20 minutes. Unlike traditional observatories, whose telescopes gather light in 30 second intervals, the heliostat gathers what Sandusky says could be as little as a “millionth of a billionth” of a watt of the sun’s power reflected off a potential asteroid, and that exposure lasts anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours. It may emerge as its own kind of astronomical technique for finding objects that are not stars.
One of the biggest advantages, should this theory pan out, is that heliostat formations are already being efforted across the globe for energy production. Giving tens of thousands of these devices a night job will help existing observatories that are already scanning the night skies for potential threats, and that could save billions of dollars in building costs of new observatories. However, Sandusky says we’re still years away from his idea becoming reality, and that there is no community doing this yet.
Sandusky shared his data at a conference for the International Society of Optics and Photonics. According to him, the next step is to prove its efficacy with a known object in space. From there, the sky is literally the limit to the novel idea born at Sandia. “The results of the early numerical computations were encouraging, and we’ve been through the scientific, peer review process to get our initial publications,” said Sandusky. “And now we’re looking for folks who are similarly interested to see just where this technology can go. There are a vast potential, is available for, thanks to the world’s, existing investment in, concentrated, sunlight for the electrical grid. And if we can find a way to use these things at night, even if it takes, many years to get the technique working well enough to contribute to astronomy and, show that it can stretch out and be the least expensive method for finding the dimmest, most distant, asteroids. It’ll be worth the effort.”
Sandusky hasn’t given a timeline on when more heliostats could be used for asteroid detection. But according to the publication “Science Direct,” more than 20 countries around the world are using heliostat farms as a solar power solution.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/sandia-national-laboratories-scientist-puts-223500155.html
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