China is building its own Death Star, like in Star Wars

© Lucasfilm Ltd

When science fiction meets reality. When the film “Star Wars: A New Hope” was released in 1977, George Lucas imagined a super-powerful weapon capable of destroying entire planets. It was the Death Star. . While this fictional weapon is unlikely to see the light of day in reality, it has undoubtedly served as inspiration for Chinese researchers, who have just produced a “pocket” version of this killer. of planets.

They have just developed a weapon with directed microwaves, if it does not use lasers to reach its target, this technology, whose first tests have proven very conclusive, would have the necessary striking force to disable any device with an electronic system.

By projecting a very powerful beam of microwaves, it could deactivate an enemy satellite. In an article in the South China Morning Post, we learn that researchers from the Xia Navigation Technology Research Institute are behind this project.

In the press release accompanying their discovery, they explain that the installation consists of 7 separate vehicles. They send a whole microwave signal into space that will converge on a single point in order to neutralize a target.

A science of timing

Surprisingly, the most difficult thing for the scientists was not to design this weapon as such. But rather to succeed in making it target a tiny target, hundreds of kilometers away. To achieve this, the scientists explain that they have a margin of error in space of the order of a few millimeters. At such distances, this is equivalent to targeting a bedbug in Paris from Toulouse.

But it is not only necessary that the microwaves all arrive at the same place, it is also necessary, and above all, that they hit their target at the same time. The level of “temporal” precision is even more impressive. Scientists explain that they have a window of 10 picoseconds (0.000,000,000,01 second).

For the moment, China has been careful not to explain how dangerous its weapon could be. The capacities and the number of possible shots of such a solution have not been revealed to the general public. But the little information already given to the public shows China's extraordinary capabilities in this new form of warfare, combining space technologies with land combat.

What applications ?

It would be easy to think that a weapon capable of disabling a satellite is less dangerous than a nuclear warhead or a simple rifle bullet. But in reality, the use of satellites has become so important that the destruction of a well-chosen target could have apocalyptic consequences.

Such a weapon could attack GPS satellites, putting an end to the location systems of ground-based armies. It could also target communication satellites or defense and imaging systems. For the moment, China assures that it is only developing this weapon for the purpose of testing and protecting its own satellites. It is already looking for the cure for the poison it has just concocted.

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