DARPA funds research to develop materials that disintegrate on command for military and intelligence use.
Imagine you’re James Bond in the middle of a super-secret mission in an exotic country, and – uh oh – you lost your spy pen that turns into a jet pack. Q’s got a whole room full of them back in England, but how does he send you a replacement? He could always drop it from a drone, but that comes with the risk of alerting the bad guys and taking away the element of surprise when you make your climactic escape.
Fortunately for you, researchers are working on a disappearing airborne delivery technology to solve just this problem—well, maybe not exactly this problem.
With $3 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Carnegie Mellon engineers are developing specialized polymers for single-use parachutes that will disintegrate on command in response to an electrical trigger.
On-Demand Disintegration
The problem begins at the molecular level.
For the parachute to disintegrate, the polymers comprising it will have to undergo depolymerization, in which large macromolecule polymers break down into their constituent parts, called monomers. This requires a chemical reaction, and this reaction has to be electrically triggered.
Even if the engineers can come up with a suitable method to achieve depolymerization, the polymers themselves must be appropriately selected to handle the range of conditions necessary for clandestine spy work.
“A lab is a very precise, controlled environment, but in the field, these parachutes will be exposed to a wide range of variants like temperature, wind, sunlight, moisture, and other non-controllable factors that could activate the chemical reaction prior to the parachute reaching its target,” explained Christopher Bettinger, one of the researchers on the project. “The material will have to be stable enough to be reliably functional, yet transient enough to break down on command.”
In addition, there are sure to be obstacles in recreating the substance at a large enough scale to be useful. Even then, what you get isn’t quite like Mission Impossible, where “this message will self destruct in five seconds.” It’s more like waiting around for ice to melt. The researchers expect that even in the best conditions, the material will take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to disappear.
The research is part of DARPA’s ICARUS Program, which is seeking to develop vanishing drones and devices for the military. So while disappearing parachutes may not be the sexiest spy gadget imaginable, the technology could eventually lend itself to drones that vanish after use. I think even Q would be impressed with that.
For more espionage engineering, find out how this British technology initiative aims to develop new spy gadgets.
