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Shiva Star or Shiva was a high-powered plasma research project with plans of using it as a weapon for the Strategic Defense Initiative. Work on it started in the early 1990s at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico in the USA. It is or was a system (presumably to be mounted on a satellite or spacecraft) for shooting down incoming missiles with toroidal projectiles of plasma, at a speed expected to be 3000 km/s in 1995 and 10,000 km/s (3% of the speed of light) in 2000. It is intended to work by damaging the missile's guidance electronics. A shot from it has the energy of 5 pounds of TNT exploding. The tests cost a few million dollars a year.[1] It was named after the Hindu god Shiva, partly because its prototype originally had four "arms"; it now has six "arms": image. The project was scrapped at some time between 1995 and 2000, because of problems keeping the plasma projectiles stable for the distances required by orbital weaponry. There are or were these other plans to use Shiva Star's technology for:-
- Research into antimatter at Albuquerque in 2000.
- To make a railgun firing small objects 10 to 15 times faster than a bullet, in space to shoot missiles down. However the heat of the plasma is a problem - if it is ultra hot plasma then anything near it would be completely burnt.
References
- ^ Jane's Defence Weekly 29 July 1998
