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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//P9R err1e11111:: W&I &His¥ (permittivity, permeability, index of refraction, and coefficients of reflection, transmission, and absorption) do not necessarily match those of any natural material. Photonic crystals exploit this principle by varying the density or refractive index of a material in a regular, periodic way. Just as light is affected by the spacing of atoms in a natural crystal, it can be affected by the (much larger) spacing of sub-wavelength features in a photonic crystal. Thus, photonic crystals can efficiently reflect some wavelengths of light while absorbing, transmitting, bending, or scattering others. This can be useful, for example, in telecommunications, where a single optical fiber may carry thousands of different signals. Because similar effects occur naturally in many gemstones (opal, for example), photonic crystals can also serve as artificial gems. Whereas photonic crystals are generally insulators, another class of materials-called superlattices-is made from semiconductors, metals, and other substances stacked in very thin layers. Such materials "look" like crystals to the electrons and photons moving through them but can have properties that do not occur-or occur only weakly-in nature. Two examples are "magnetoresistive" materials made from alternating layers of iron and a nonmagnetic material such as chromium, Even in very tiny quantities, such materials can be used to sense magnetic fields with much greater sensitivity than can any natural material and are widely used in hard disk drives and digital compasses. In a "metamaterial," the sub-wavelength features are conductive metals surrounded by a transparent dielectric material such as glass, air, or empty space. In much the same way a metal rod interacts with radio waves and can thus serve as an antenna, the "atoms" of a meta material create strong resonances at particular wavelengths that can have more profound effects on light than can any of the material systems described above. The best known of these is negative index of refraction, a property that allows materials to bend light "the wrong way" and thus defy the laws of classical optics. LIQUID CRYSTALS Although they were discovered in the late 19th century and have been used in video displays since the 1960s, liquid crystals can be thought of as an advanced 21st century technology that somehow fell backward in time. They are essentially a fourth state of matter, possessing some properties of a liquid and some of a crystalline solid. In addition, they are "birefringent," meaning they have a different index of refraction, depending on the angle or direction of light passing through them. They are capable of serving as photonic crystals, and under the influence of light, heat, electric and magnetic fields, and mechanical or chemical alignment layers, they can be rearranged at a moment's notice so that their optical properties are transformed. Today, people are accustomed to thinking of liquid crystals as pixels in a video display, However, their capabilities extend far beyond this. With proper substrate design and the application of electric fields and other alignment or disalignment mechanisms1 liquid crystals can be used to reversibly block, bend, focus, scatter, reflect, transmit, twist, polarize, diffuse, and absorb light in limitless combinations. UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOR 0551&:ilirllk W&lii &HI::¥ 4
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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.