A blitz of media, punditry, and ofªcial pronouncements raise the specter of war on the internet. Future conºicts may well take place in cyberspace, where victory or defeat could be determined in mere "nanoseconds."1 Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has even warned of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor."2 Nor are fears of cyberwar abstract speculation. Events such as the denial of service attacks against Estonian and Georgian government websites, the Stuxnet worm designed to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and the recent hacking of U.S. military computer networks seem to indicate that the era of cyberwar has already arrived.Cyberwar can be viewed as the most recent phase in the ongoing revolution in military affairs.3 This time, however, the threat is said to be directed at the sophisticated technological civilizations of the West, rather than at desert insurgents or the leaders of rogue states with arsenals of inferior second world military hardware. Joseph Nye expresses this emerging consensus, "Dependence on complex cyber systems for support of military and economic activities creates new vulnerabilities in large states that can be exploited by nonstate actors."4 Following this logic, the United States appears destined to be "the Erik Gartzke
Under controlled laboratory conditions, lasers represent a source of energy with well-defined parameters suitable for mimicking phenomena such as ablation, disintegration, and plasma formation processes that take place during the hypervelocity atmospheric entry of meteoroids. Furthermore, lasers have also been proposed for employment in future space exploration and planetary defense in a wide range of potential applications. This highlights the importance of an experimental investigation of lasers’ interaction with real samples of interplanetary matter: meteorite specimens. We summarize the results of numerous meteorite laser ablation experiments performed by several laser sources—a femtosecond Ti:Sapphire laser, the multislab ceramic Yb:YAG Bivoj laser, and the iodine laser known as PALS (Prague Asterix Laser System). The differences in the ablation spots’ morphology and their dependence on the laser parameters are examined via optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and profilometry in the context of the meteorite properties and the physical characteristics of laser-induced plasma.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.