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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, DIA-08-0911-016, is dated 14 December 2009. It was prepared by the Defense Warning Office's Acquisition Support Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency and is one of a series of FY 2009 advanced technology reports under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It is a primer on programmable matter and smart materials such as quantum dots, metamaterials and liquid crystals, and on how they could manage heat and energy and provide camouflage on spacecraft. It concludes that the possible gains would be significant and well worth pursuing.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 12/14/09, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD describes “programmable matter” as smart materials whose properties can be changed on command, potentially allowing spacecraft components to change function through software updates rather than physical repair or replacement. The report suggests that such materials could someday enable adjustable sensors, smart windows, heat control, energy collection, active camouflage, and systems that switch between different functions, making spacecraft more flexible and adaptable. At the same time, it presents the idea as highly speculative and emphasizes major technical obstacles, including manufacturing at extremely small scales, shielding against radiation and electromagnetic interference, managing temperature effects, reducing component failures, and preventing hacking or malicious control. Overall, the document presents programmable matter as a promising long-term concept over the next 50 years, while judging that simpler near-term uses such as smart windows and energy-saving surface materials are far more realistic than the more ambitious aerospace applications.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /1'91t err1e11111:: W&I &Hkl/ Table 1. Daily Household Energy Consumption (USA, 1993-1997) Space Heating 41 kWh Water Heating 15 kWh Refrigeration 7 kWh Space Cooling (air conditioner) 3kWh Lighting 3kWh Clothes Drying 2kWh Cooking lkWh Dishwashing lkWh Other Appliances (TV, stereo, computer, etc.) ?kWh Over 80 percent of the energy budget is spent heating and cooling things-often at the same time. It is clearly desirable to recapture the waste heat from cooling operations and divert it to subsystems, such as the water heater. Energy- Scavenging Spacecraft Skins Programmable materials can also be used to harvest, store, and redirect other forms of energy. Spacecraft are constantly bathed in a very high solar energy flux and experience sharp temperature gradients, as well as periodic changes in magnetic and electric field, All of these represent possible energy sources that can be scavenged from the environment without disrupting other spacecraft operations. The photoelectric effect occurs when photons strike a material such as a semiconductor or metal. The energy of the photons is absorbed by the electron shells of atoms, and as a result, some electrons may shift from the valence band to the higher, looser energies of the conduction band. This is the source of the voltage in photovoltaic cells and allows the direct conversion of light energy into electricity. This effect generates electron-hole pairs (that is, knocks electrons off their parent atoms) in a material such as silicon, and if the electrons are forced to go in one direction and the holes in the other, then an electrical voltage is generated. Today's commercial solar cells are around 13-percent efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, which makes them economically marginal for use on Earth in any but the sunniest climates, Even NASA's most sophisticated-and expensive-solar cells are usually no more than :2.4-percent efficient, although experimental multilayered designs have achieved upwards of 40-percent efficiency in the laboratory. (Notably, such converters once blurred the lines between a designer material and a collection of nanoscale devices.) These efficiency numbers reflect a practical limit, not a theoretical one. The available materials-primarily silicon and other semiconductors-are simply not very photoelectric, and the junctions we can place in them are not very efficient electron hole separators. With natural atoms, the choices are quite limited. However, with artificial atoms and designer materials of various types, and particularly programmable materials that can adjust to changing conditions, much higher efficiencies are possible. Clearly, it is very desirable for the sunward face of a spacecraft to be as photovoltaic as possible. UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR AEEJCJA! !!SE ON! X 11
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 20 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.