DOW-UAP-D118: Aerospace Applications of Programmable Matter - Artificial Atoms, Smart Windows and a Self-Reconfiguring Space Station

Source file: DOW-UAP-D118_AAWSAP-DIRD-Aerospace-Applications-of-Programmable-Matter-December-14-2009.pdf Originating agency: Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Defense Warning Office, under the AAWSA Program Document type: Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), "Acquisition Threat Support" series; control number DIA-08-0911-016 Date: 14 December 2009 (information cutoff date, ICOD: 1 December 2009) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, with the FOUO caveat struck through on every page; released 2026 Page count: 20 VIRIN: 260918-D-D0360-1107 PURSUE Release: 6

Summary

"Aerospace Applications of Programmable Matter" is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document dated 14 December 2009, prepared by the Acquisition Support Division (DWO-3) of the DIA's Defense Warning Office, Directorate for Analysis. Its author is redacted as "AAP Person 90." The standard administrative note calls it "one in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009" under the AAWSA Program and names AAP Person 1, the AAWSA Program Manager, as the point of contact; a copyright warning covers its photographs. It shares its date and information cutoff date with the metallic-glasses paper, DOW-UAP-D117 (DIA-08-0911-012).

The paper calls itself a white paper, "by no means an exhaustive reference," that "is intended to serve as a primer on the principles behind smart materials and their possible aerospace applications over the next 50 years" (page 4). It moves from physics (four kinds of "atoms") through commercial smart windows, spacecraft thermal management and energy scavenging, to a fictional day aboard a space station whose hull reconfigures itself, and closes with research directions and a one-paragraph conclusion. It has seven figures, one table and nine endnotes, and its tone is closer to popular science than to a technical review.

The paper does not mention UFOs or UAP. It does touch themes relevant to the program's signature-reduction area: "chameleon-style camouflage," "deflection of laser beams," "outright invisibility," and a station that can "turn 'invisible.'" Its main technical areas are materials and power generation, with signature reduction and the human interface as secondary threads.

Research Article

Four kinds of "atoms"

The paper's organizing idea is that light and electric fields cannot "see" individual atoms, so matter behaves as a continuous substance, and that recent decades have produced at least four kinds of "atoms" with that property. Natural atoms are the 92 elements of the periodic table (the rest being unstable). Quantum dots, the second kind, are "sometimes known as 'artificial atoms'": structures "usually on the order of 5-20 nanometers" that confine a modest number of electrons in all three dimensions, so that they form standing waves resembling atomic orbitals (pages 5-6). Two differences matter. An infinite number of configurations is possible, allowing "designer atoms with properties that simply do not occur on the periodic table," and electrons can be pumped in and out with electric fields, giving "a bounded but infinite variety of material properties that can be summoned or dismissed at will" (pages 6-7).

The third kind is sub-wavelength structure: photonic crystals, superlattices (the magnetoresistive layers used in hard disk drives and digital compasses) and metamaterials, whose metallic resonators can produce a negative index of refraction that bends light "the wrong way" and seems to "defy the laws of classical optics" (page 8). The fourth is liquid crystals, which the author calls "an advanced 21st century technology that somehow fell backward in time" (page 8), able to block, bend, focus, polarize or scatter light "in limitless combinations."

From "impossible" materials to dynamic ones

A section titled "'Impossible' Materials" borrows Roger Bacon's phrase "natural magic" for mirrors, lenses and magnets, and presents nanostructured materials as "a higher order of magic." Its example is the hypothesized "metapolarizer": where ordinary polarizers waste 50 percent or more of the light, a metapolarizer would rotate the unwanted polarity instead, which could "double the battery life of a laptop display." Such materials are still static, however, and the paper argues that "The greatest revolution in materials science may in fact come from materials capable of changing their properties on demand" (page 9).

Figure 4 shows a notional "Wellstone" fiber: concentric conductor and semiconductor layers around a memory core and power and control lines, a flexible cylinder "whose surface is studded with artificial atoms," which could be woven into a bulk material programmable by external signals (page 10). The paper is candid about limits. Many properties are correlated, so a material that is electrically conductive and thermally insulating "probably could not be made transparent as well"; "A computer is unlikely to double as an air conditioner." The "smart matter of 2050" will probably be electrically operated, and that raises three problems: manufacturing tolerances at or beyond current limits; electromagnetic interference, "Like a pocket calculator in a microwave oven"; and hackers, who must not be handed "the keys to matter itself" (page 10).

The greatest challenge, though, is temperature, which shifts semiconductor bandgaps, photonic-crystal spacings and liquid-crystal symmetries. Early programmable quantum-dot materials were so temperature-sensitive that heat turned out to be the easiest way to control them, and here the author switches to the first person: "we were able to enhance these effects to produce thermally activated smart materials with no need for electric controls at all" (page 11). The document does not say who "we" are.

Smart windows: the commercial evidence

The most data-heavy part of the paper concerns buildings. It cites a thermochromic paint developed by Chinese researchers in the mid-1990s, said to raise a building's temperature by about 4°C in winter and lower it by about 8°C in summer, and notes that buildings account for 40 percent of U.S. energy use, 71 percent of its electricity and 38 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions. A 2003 study by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) for ASHRAE modeled windows whose solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) varied between 0.26 and 0.40 in eight U.S. cities. Low-emissivity ("low-E") glass saved an average of 8-15 percent of annual heating, cooling and ventilation costs; dynamic windows saved a further 6-19 percent and cut peak cooling load by another 5-38 percent. The study is quoted as concluding that dynamic windows "provide the best of all worlds" (page 12).

The paper then turns to a single product. "In the third quarter of 2009, [a smart-window company] introduced [its window film]," an "active-passive thermoreflective" film, transparent when cold and partly reflective when hot, with an SHGC range of 0.12 to 0.43, "more than twice the range studied by LBNL" (page 12). Two figures show the film and its projected five-year cumulative savings in Denver against leading incumbent window filters; at a retail cost of $25 per square foot, the payback is put at 5-10 years (page 13). These figures rest on "Studies performed by [the company] using LBNL tools" and, according to the endnotes, on "Internal research & modeling at [the company], 2006-2009." The paper presents no independent test data for the product.

Heat, power and reconfigurable sensors in orbit

For spacecraft, the paper starts from a joke version of the three laws of thermodynamics ("(1) you cannot win, (2) you cannot break even, and (3) you cannot quit the game") and argues that energy can at least be moved, converted and stored. A Peltier junction (Figure 7) pumps heat from one face to the other when current flows. Natural materials manage about 10 percent efficiency, but in 2001 scientists at the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina used semiconductor superlattices to build a junction with "2.5 times the efficiency and 23,000 times the speed of all previous designs" (page 14). A programmable hull could create such coolers on any surface, make its skin conductive in some places and insulating in others, and store heat for later release. Table 1, U.S. daily household energy use for 1993-1997 (41 kWh for space heating, 15 for water heating, 7 for refrigeration and so on), serves as an analog for a crewed spacecraft: "Over 80 percent of the energy budget is spent heating and cooling things" (page 15).

The same hull could scavenge energy. Commercial solar cells were about 13 percent efficient, NASA's most sophisticated cells "usually no more than 24-percent," and experimental multilayer designs above 40 percent in the laboratory; the author argues these are practical, not theoretical, limits that designer materials could raise (page 15). Other sources are the steep temperature gradient at the spacecraft's day-night terminator and piezoelectric pressure from the cabin atmosphere and crew bumps, since "energy scavenging is an excellent activity even at very low efficiency," with storage in nanostructured ultracapacitors or superconducting loops on the cold, shadowed side (page 16). Reconfigurable devices follow: a single attitude sensor switching between sun, horizon and star sensing, low-cost multispectral imagers with no moving parts, and color-changing solar-sail controllers for station keeping. The paper also states that "a 64-qbit computer is roughly 18 billion billion times as powerful as a 64-bit binary one" (page 17), a popular simplification: quantum speed-ups are established only for particular classes of problems.

A day aboard a programmable space station

The most unusual section is a short piece of fiction (pages 17-18). A station in low Earth orbit is "one big, dead-black solar collector" with no windows, and its capacitors are "literally growing larger" as they store energy. At "0600 Houston time" portholes and mirrors gradually fade "into existence" to wake the crew, and they crawl across the walls as the station turns. The glass is mirrored so that "ground-based and space-based telescopes cannot see inside the station," and "In a pinch, the station can even turn 'invisible.'" Almost any surface can serve as a desk, keyboard or screen. When the station risks overheating, Peltier radiators marked with HOT SURFACE warnings swell on the shadowed side; when a predicted solar storm arrives, the hull generates a magnetic field to deflect charged particles, with superconducting sheets keeping the field away from the crew. In Earth's shadow the station lives on stored charge and heat, and at 2130 Houston time the lights dim for sleep.

Research directions and conclusions

The closing sections are more sober. Because consumer technology now spins into aerospace rather than the reverse (the paper's examples are civilian GPS receivers and off-the-shelf laptops on the Space Shuttle), progress "will likely depend on research and development for consumer applications," and smart windows and energy-saving metapolarizers "should be considered the most promising for research over the next 5 years" (page 19). Longer term, metamaterials need features of "100 nanometers or less, and often as little as 10 nanometers"; liquid crystals need greater resistance to ultraviolet and ionizing radiation; and the addressable quantum-dot array, "Perhaps the most promising long-term technology," needs its temperature sensitivity tamed and shielding that may rely on "as-yet-undeveloped techniques or materials." The paper predicts that "by 2050 it seems likely that our grandchildren will have difficulty imagining a world where these objects are made from traditional, inert materials" (page 19), then warns of "unknown unknowns" and ends: "we must roll up our sleeves and begin experimenting" (page 20). The conclusion concedes that elements of the scenario "are speculative" but calls the potential gains "well worth pursuing."

Significance

This DIRD is a forward-looking primer rather than a technical assessment. It contains no threat analysis, no assessment of foreign capability beyond a passing reference to Chinese thermochromic paint, and no UAP material. Its link to AAWSAP's technical areas is clearest in two places: energy harvesting and storage for spacecraft (power generation) and adaptive surfaces offering camouflage, laser deflection and "invisibility" (signature reduction), although the paper never explains how invisibility would work beyond re-emitting "a matching signal" on the far side.

Three caveats matter. First, the strongest quantitative evidence concerns buildings, not spacecraft, and much of it concerns one company's product, supported by that company's own modeling. Second, the author writes in the first person about having produced thermally activated smart materials, but the document never explains that relationship, and the author's identity is redacted. Third, several claims (the qubit comparison, the station scenario) are illustrations rather than engineering estimates, as the conclusion partly acknowledges. The paper's clearest testable judgment is its timeline: smart windows within five years, fully programmable matter around 2050.

Key People

Locations

Key Concepts

Notable Quotes

"However, when sensors, filters, emitters, and photovoltaic solar panels are made of Programmable Matter smart materials, the solution to a component failure or new mission requirement might be as simple as a software update." -- page 4

"Smart materials can even create new defensive capabilities, such as chameleon-style camouflage, deflection of laser beams, and even outright invisibility." -- page 4

"Like a pocket calculator in a microwave oven, programmable materials face a harsh electromagnetic environment and will need to be shielded and safeguarded against spurious behavior." -- page 10

"We must be extremely cautious about handing malicious hackers the keys to matter itself!" -- page 10

"The greatest challenge, however, is temperature." -- page 11

"In a pinch, the station can even turn 'invisible,' taking light and heat from one side and emitting a matching signal on the other side." -- page 17

"Therefore, near-term applications such as smart windows and energy-saving metapolarizers, which offer direct and immediate economic advantages (namely energy savings) and which dovetail neatly with existing infrastructure, should be considered the most promising for research over the next 5 years." -- page 19

"Many elements of the preceding scenario are based on current and emerging technologies; others are speculative." -- page 20