Slashdot Mirror
Airborne Laser Successfully Tracks, Hits Missile
fructose writes "The Airborne Laser managed to acquire, track, and illuminate a test missile a few days ago. According to the press release, the Boeing plane 'used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicolas Island, Calif ... issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system ... fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and ... fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept.' The sensors on board the missile confirmed the 'hit.' Michael Rinn, ABL's program director, said, 'Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job.' The next steps will be to test the high-power laser at full strength in flight and do a complete system test later this year. Its success or failure will determine whether the project gets canceled. Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream."
Which is generally isn't above the clouds in the stratosphere.
Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream.
Eh, it's cool and all, but I'd rather see a house explode with popcorn.
Billion dollar laser tag. They didn't destroy the missile. The missile's laser tag vest scored the hit.
If it uses mirrors of some type to aim the laser "beam", won't missile designers just make the missile housing out of the same reflective material?
If it does not, how does it get pointed in the right direction fast enough?
These articles are always so light on the interesting details.
Refraction, reflection, dispersion and absorption. Those are the problems.
How many Joules does it take to burn through silica dust? How reflective is LOX? What if the inbound craft is covered with retro-reflecting beads (like stop signs)?
Doesn't matter, apparently. The total amount of energy in the laser overheats the reflective surface long before a significant amount of the light is reflected. One of the problems of aiming high powered lasers is that the mirrors that guide the beam melt.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Being able to aim a laser turret at moving object for a few seconds is impresive, but shooting it down another beast altogether. Protective coating from dense material or ablative coating for missile is pretty easy to make, all you really need is another booster stage to compensate for extra mass. Making missile spin to reflect heat better is also pretty simple. Moore's law makes computational power necessary to spin a missile faster, easyer then makeing a more powerfull laser. Air borne laser is also infrared, it will not travel far through the atmosphere. Does anyone have some hard numbers? Or is this another cost understated, ability underated, "Flying Edsel" funded by Republican party, just for sole purpose of being "Strong On Defence" ?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/star-wars-fake-fooled-the-world-1461979.html
I see a press release from the people who claim to have pulled it off... which doesn't mean a thing.
Nothing, in theory. Just like there's nothing in theory that says the rocket can't have a zillion other systems designed to defeat this laser. In practice, however, the answer is weight. A rocket's weight is around 80-90% fuel with payload being from 2-5%. A small increase in payload weight leads to a great increase in the rocket's size and fuel load.
A rocket designer ends up having to make a series of compromises between the strength of the rocket itself, the payload and the range. If you want to protect your rocket you're going to have to give up payload, give up range or increase rocket size, all of which make them less useful as weapons.
this technology is totally useless in its current state. high power flying lasers will never find a use without a high power flying shark to combine it with.
Good people go to bed earlier.
so, we tune the laser to a color that your reflective surface doesn't reflect; or, since no reflective surface is 100% reflective (some energy is always absorbed) we amp the laser up until the absorbed energy is enough to vaporize the reflective coating. Then, you're toast.
Wouldn't Boeing have a lot of incentive to hype this to ensure that the contract got renewed for further research? It's possible that they set the bar for success so low and/or made the experiment so contrived that they couldn't help but achieve it.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Sigh. Not until I can hammer a six inch spike through a board with my penis.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Actually, the lasers are on a plane, presumably above the clouds. See article.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
My brother-in-law analyzed satellite throw weights for Sandia Labs. A reflective or camo paint job is a trivial addition to the mass of the rocket. OTOH, a perfectly polished surface might well serve the same end at no addition to the mass.
So how will this anti-ICBM technology be used against a terrorist carrying these suitcase a-bombs that are said to exist?
The problem is, ss soon as we get a 100% effective missile shield, enemies will find a way to deliver nuclear armaments. It wouldn't even be that hard. They can just park a ship off a Manhattan and light one off if they wanted to.
This whole idea of shooting down missiles is a waste of fucking time and money. If we gave the money we were spending on this bullshit to the countries to foster good will, we'd be a lot better off.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
When the terrorists blow up Los Angeles, they aren't going to be using an ICBM. They're going to be floating a bomb into the harbor on a container ship. Your fancy airborn lasers will be useless.
But don't let that stop you from wasting billions of dollars on this. It's just all the sooner China takes over as the world's primary superpower.
Disclaimer: IANAP(hysicist)
If I remember the laws of thermodynamics from my physics courses correctly, things at lower temperatures have lower amount of energy. Things are frozen by taking away the matter's energy at the molecular level. If you "pump up" some matter (i.e. give it lots of energy or make it hot) then the effect of pumping it up is negated when the matter is frozen, since you need to remove all the energy.
That may be true, but you've got to see the limitations in that too. There are no paints that are reflective over a large amount of the light spectrum, so you gotta pick your poison. A normal mirror, for example, would not hold up against an infrared laser.
Furthermore doing that requires knowing the exact frequency of the airborne laser, something which is presumably not public knowledge. It is these days relatively trivial to change the frequency of the laser, e.g. doubling or halving it. Presumably such tricks could be built in and change the frequency "on the fly".
So yes, given enough information you could probably protect the rocket from a single specific laser, for a few years until the next generation of lasers. But it'd require spies to get the information to start with, it would be dependant on not having spies in your own organisation and you'd need a few doctors in chemistry to actually make the paint (since that paint needs to do more than just reflect laser pulses, it must hold up in mutli-mach flight and not heat up, it must not peel off with a constant explosion just below it, it must stand up to both the freezing temperatures in clouds and the heat the rocket will develop during descent. It must even be able to deal with ice formation on the rocket itself, so it's not like you can buy this in your local toy store).
Even if you are right, if it's simple to increase the reflectivity of the rocket by an order of magnitude, then you make the ABL's job an order of magnitude harder. This would be huge of course, increasing the requirements of the ABL to compensate for atmospheric distortion, increasing the time the ABL has to stay trained on a specific spot, probably affecting effective range, and ultimately reducing the overall cost effectiveness of the ABL. All this for a simple polishing of the rocket.
XML causes global warming.
With shields , offcourse :-) .
Slipping shoelaces ?
The quantum processes of state inversion, pumping electrons, etc. are all done assuming 0 K temperature already.
Beside suitcase bomb, jsut multiply the number of missile or decoy with a "heat" source in it or whatever.
Can you imagine the energy requirement and the number of laser necessary to deflect a full scale attack of say, the russian ? Even if only 50% of the missile go through (and from seeing the dfficulty of development I am being generous) , your country is about as parking-lotted as it can be.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Changing the output frequency of a giant high energy chemical laser is extremely tricky. Frequency doubling demands a very pure coherence to get good efficiency, and even then "good" in this context means above 50% power converted to the new frequency. With a weapons laser, you're going to have a hell of a cooling problem in the converting medium. Then again, if reflective anti-laser coatings become common, it shouldn't be too difficult to add on a free electron laser system to burn off the mirror layer before the main beam strikes. A free electron laser can change operating frequencies trivially, just by adjusting its internal magnetic field.
They can just park a ship off a Manhattan and light one off if they wanted to.
Ships move at 20-30mph. Ballistic missiles move at 15,000mph +. If we make it so that our enemies have to get a ship into one our harbors, it becomes a much simpler problem. We would need to have more Coast Guard people to basically board every ship, with neutron detectors, but, its something we can do. We can track ships as they are approaching the USA, track them as they leave ports, follow them, and pretty much monitor every boat on the ocean.
This is my sig.
It is merely a single contrarian idea. The laser tests would be visible from orbit - and frequency/energy could be sampled as simply by mere spectroscopy: the interaction between radiation and matter as a function of wavelength and easily measured. Displaced / superheated air will reveal the operating wavelength and energy density of the laser.
If we are talking dye lasers or tunable cavity lasers - you still have massive problems dealing with the excitation as frequencies change. It might well prove to be too complex to fit aboard an aircraft.
I built the Scientific American CO2 Laser project back in the 1960s - it was impressive and it could shatter glass at more than 100 ft. Still, the energy necessary to power an airborne device is going to have to be stored - probably in banks of capacitors.
Realistically, an aircraft mounted rail gun might serve just as well and be far less complex to deal with (absent the effects on the aircraft of the massive magnetic impulse).
We can track ships as they are approaching the USA, track them as they leave ports, follow them, and pretty much monitor every boat on the ocean.
We can?
Have gnu, will travel.
Do you work hard to be this wrong?
The Germans have soldiers in in Afghanistan.
If you want an oil leaking POS british car feel free to buy one. If I wanted that kinda junk I would by a GM vehicle. I buy cars not from folks I like, but from people who build good cars. This is called capitalism, you should check it out it is a great system.
You are a fool if you think we have "friends", or if we should give those folks free money. The system you propose is no more than a hair's breadth from corporatism. Your appeals to nationalism are would make Mussolini proud.
I surely hope this is not the view center-right in this country.
Our anti-rocket defenses have been gross failures. This technology has a long way to go to be viable.
I'm glad that we have established that you just spout rhetoric made by idiots long before you. That line was first used by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (may he burn in hell). Mind you, that was the same man who was responsible for the Edsel at Ford and practically every idiotic military idea during his tenure at the Pentagon.
The Nike Zeus system was consistently shown to be able to achieve missile kills in the 1960s using its standard nuclear warhead. I've also heard that there was a (classified) number of tests where the Zeus rockets made skin kills without said warhead. A modified variant was also capable of ASAT kills. The Zeus system, combined with a bomber such as the B-70 Valkyrie, would have rendered ICBMs obsolete. It was only the fact that we had a SecDef with a hard-on for ICBMs that ensured their survival.
And, by the way -- Zeus + B-70 would have saved the US a ton of money, relatively speaking, compared to all the money we spend on missiles. We were forced to build hundreds of massive, hardened missile silos to protect our ineffective ICBMs from counterattack. This is an incredible waste of money compared to the cost it would have taken to upgrade our Air Force bases to be able to support an active fleet of B-70s. Not to mention we already had Nike missile sites in place around most major cities; these could have been simply upgraded to Zeus missiles, as had been done with the upgrade from Ajax to Hercules.
Meanwhile, we spend vast sums on this technology when we really ought to be looking to get outside of Earth orbit. 40 years is 30 years too long. We ought to have manned Moon and Mars bases by now.
I believe the wording you're looking for is "Meanwhile, we have spent vast sums on ground wars and Space Shuttle technology when we really ought to be...". The amount of money spent on ABM technology is a drop in the bucket compared both of the above mentioned boondoggles.
You might try looking into the body count of Iraqi civilians. That and the little fact that we have now setup them up to have a fun civil war.