Slashdot Mirror
Watch a Lockheed Martin Laser Destroy a Missile In Flight
An anonymous reader writes "As well as providing the equipment necessary to fire missiles, defense contractors also want to offer customers the ability to defend against them. Lockheed Martin is doing just that with its Area Defense Anti-Munitions (ADAM) system. ADAM is a high energy laser system mounted on a trailer allowing it to be transported around quickly to help defend high-value targets. It is still in prototype form, but basically uses a 10-kilowatt fiber laser which can be focused on to a moving target up to 2 kilometers away."
n/t
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
But can it be mounted on a shark?
Bet it costs a fortune, though.
Considering this a defensive system 2 kilometers means the high velocity threat is nearly on top of what you want to protect. It's 'destruction' is still likely to rain down debris nearby.
How long before we start seeing missiles with highly polished chrome finish on the outside?
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
>> As well as providing the equipment necessary to fire missiles, defense contractors also want to offer customers the ability to defend against them.
Naturally. How else would you extract top dollar from both sides?
Maybe carriers won't go extinct after all
Now if they can make it small enough to zap the flies and mosquitos that inhabit my house in the summer...
Why don't you take an existing product and put it on a truck.
Boeing did this years ago from a 747, while in flight.
so LM, who makes planes, said lets do that but do it easier by not making it fly.
yawn.
In response, all the worlds missles are now chrome plated, and you're burning the city or a forest, or whatever on the ground.
A trailer is considerably more maneuverable than a 747. It also uses a lot less gas if defending a stationary target. And a lot less $$$ overhead just to mount a weapon.
Plus pretty much all of the other reasons why automakers are still around when aviation manufacturers can make stuff that *flies*
These are designed to defend against qassam type rockets. Qassam rockets are very simple rockets (steel tubes, warhead on the tip, no electronic gizmos) that are fired into Israel by the Palestinians. I doubt that they could defend against something more substantial.
Considering this a defensive system 2 kilometers means the high velocity threat is nearly on top of what you want to protect.
Let's say we have a cruise missile traveling at roughly mach 1 or about 1,150 kph - actually pretty slow compared to many missiles. That means that the missile would cover the 2 kilometers in about 6.25 seconds. Better have a hell of a good target tracking system...
north korean missiles will be so unpredictable and so off target, it'd be *impossible* to position a truck, or even a fleet of them, in position to take one out.
Well LM did do the beam control and targeting for that Laser on the Boeing airplanejust saying, its a little naive to make this Lockheed vs Boeing (it wouldn't surprise me if Boeing had some part of this laser on a truck)
I always wondered. What if the targets are covered with a high quality reflective mirror surface?
We told you SDI would work!!
.
Ft Bliss USA, they were testing lasers on conventional ballistics. Maybe the program finally completed and this is the end result. But I suspect this can also shoot down ballistics as well.
you forgot that part.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So at mach 5, you really don't have much time to kill the missile...
Why don't you take an existing product and put it on a truck.
Boeing did this years ago from a 747, while in flight.
so LM, who makes planes, said lets do that but do it easier by not making it fly.
yawn.
The Boeing system(the YAL-1) was a chemical laser. Those things are markedly better at high power compared to ordinary photopumped gas lasers or solid state lasers; but are somewhat disliked because of the difficulties involved in supplying and exhausting substantial quantities of nasty halogens under field conditions.
The rockets were painted black. What happens when a rocket is not painted black?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm guessing you need pretty clear weather for the targeting system to work.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The laser system used on previous airborne tests were chemical lasers. The lasers consumed chemicals each time they fired, which usually had really messy logistic problems and were expensive. The 747 system would only get about 20 shots before having to land and get more fuel for the laser systems.
Newer laser systems in the news in the last year or two are doing similar things that may seem like they were done a decade ago, but instead are being done with solid state lasers that only consume electricity in the short run. As long as they are supplied electricity, they can keep firing, and that makes them much cheaper and easier to actually use in real world situations. The systems should ultimately be much more robust and reliable too, but it has taken a lot of research to get such systems to be portable and high power.
This was talked about in the 80s (there was even a movie made about it) but was neutralized when it was learned that all Russia had to do to completely nullify this defense mechanism was to have their missiles rotate in flight.
Missile defense system is designed to operate when the target is in *clear* sight? What if skies are not so clear - heavy rain, fog, or dust?
"Baron, my apologies. These madmen are attacking under cover of the storm." --Frank Herbert, "Dune"
A) This is for targeting smaller missile (non-balistic). Smaller missiles are... well smaller. They take less heat to damage and cause failures and they have less surface area to spread the heat out over.
B) That was 30 years ago. Laser power and tracking has improved just a bit since then.
C) This is more about defending against the kind of dumb rockets that Hezbollah fires into Israel every so often as it is about an engagement with a highly funded modern military.
Terminator: "Phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range."
Shopkeeper: "hey, just what you see here pal..."
Terminator: "Uzi nine millimeter."
Shopkeeper: "You really know your guns. This baby's perfect for home defense..."
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Rotation of missiles in flight also makes escape velocity lower.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/exopolitica/exopolitics_vonbraun02.htm
http://www.brucedepalma.com/n-machine/spinning-ball-experiment/
But did they have to follow the video with PSY's Gangnam Style?
Apparently no birds were harmed in the making of that video.
We'll probably never see the videos where they were :-)
Honest question.
What alternatives are there to a low-production, high-powered laser that likely requires a ton of support crew/machinery to take out missiles?
Phalanx or successors? Are these considered competent?
What about missile-to-missile platforms?
And how useful is this thing if it's not an on tangential course?
There is no defense, like a good offense.
--fatboy
They are very different creatures. The Boeing YAL-1 was deigned to shoot down missiles 100s of miles away (ballistic missiles in launch phase.). And part of the problem was its lack of range– it had to linger close (for ballistic missiles that is) to its target, which means you would have to have multiple plans covering the same area to accommodate refueling, service, etc.
ADAM - Absolute Destruction of Available Mass
(Megazone-23, part 2)
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
I guess this makes me part of the "What's happening to Slashdot? Everything was better in the imaginary past"-crowd but I can't remember seeing as many stories glorifying purely military accomplishments as in the last few months. Tried to search a bit, maybe I am just imagining things.
Sure, achievements are not tied to applications but I can't see much else here either.
Getting this slightly disgusted feeling.
can be higher then 2 KM for maximum dispersion thus this test is meaningless except for conventional warheads.
so when the nuclear missle/bomb goes off at 1.5 km cause the chrome plate refracts enough of it.....POOF and hundreds of meters actual nukes DONT HIT the target the explode and the cone downward is the affect......thus you get your mushroom cloud....
thus this is as useless as wasting power required...go look at how much a laser of this power needs.
I have wondered why they just don't use the good old CO2 industrial lasers scaled up instead of halogen based ones. Then again I am not big into knowledge of lasers and the how and why but it would seem that if a 100W CO2 laser is good for welding then why wouldn't a 10KW one be good for burning through missles?
Time to offend someone
2KM is kinda useless once the missile has achieved ballistic trajectory.
At speed of 2.5km/second, the missile will whiz pass this thing quicker than any damage can be done to it.
Note both the videos show the missile at launch, when they are not at top speed, may work for Hamas to Israel scenario, won't work for North Korea to South Korea type of scenario.
Why is the distance in km?
This thing is pretty darned useful, in the right context. It is focusing on a quickly moving object a few tens of meters long from kilometers away, keeping it lit for a period of seconds. That's the equivalent of targeting an automobile from across town. Did you see that laser moving around on that target? I didn't...
You connect this thing to a larger laser powered off of the grid, and you've got control up to the horizon.
This thing is no larger than a semi-trailer: that means it can be placed without anybody knowing where. They tell you it tracks targets up to 5 km away. That doesn't mean it can't go farther.
Now, it looked to me that the laser was focused on the propellant portion of the missile, where the heat could ignite the fuel. I'd like to know if it can target a tumbling ballistic target, like a warhead separated from the missile (which can still hit its target).
Probably the biggest problem, especially for some of the more mobile methods, was providing electrical power. If you had an optimistically 20% efficient 100 kW CO2 laser, you would need 500 kW of electrical power. Using conventional capacitors, this works out to a couple metric tons of just capacitors, per second of fire time you want. Recent developments in capacitors would have changed this easily by an order of magnitude or two, although I'm not sure how reliability factors into it (I've only worked on stationary systems where space & weight were not a concern, and power densities of the capacitors were lower than the estimate used above).
Second, usually smaller wavelengths mean smaller optics, which would then mean easier to aim or alternatively lets you focus further away for a given optic size. So a 3.6 um DF laser would need optics a third the size of a 10.6 um laser, and a COIL laser would be nearly a tenth of the size.
Also, different kinds of lasers have different qualities to the beams which makes some easier to focus over long distances or to apply further tech to counter distortion due to air. And at the higher powers, some designs would be much more reliable than others. In the end though, once caught up, solid state lasers like in the story here, would basically win at all of these factors.
Finally we can get rid of those pesky geese hanging out near our airport! (And if I worked there, I could pick up a nice lunch at the same time.)
As a practical test to prove the potential I'd say it was a pretty good success. Imagine if you will mounting several of these things inside a 747 with some being able to shoot the laser out the bottom, the sides, and even the top of the jet. You'd have a mobile platform that can get reasonably close to the launch site and destroy missiles before they got close. From the looks of the size of the trailer I'd say you could easily fit 4 to 6 of these inside a jumbo jet or retrofitted B1 bomber and still have plenty of space for crew that may work on the things. Put them on a stealth bomber and you could easily destroy those missiles on the launch pad.
missiles with less than a 2 km blast radius at the United States?
Those damn Mexicans and Canadians getting uppity eh?
Sounds pretty useless or a show of force at this stage of development.
Besides, the German-built one is better. They probably have hoverboards and flying cars over there by now. With lasers.
Them and their capitalism.
It would get expensive but firing more than one missile at your target would defeat a laser that can only target one. The launch sites would have to be located far enough away from each other that the missiles would be out of the blast radius for most of the flight. With civilian GPSs and wireless communication, I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to synchronize the firing so that the missiles reach the target at the same time. (GPSs not for guidance but for calculating firing delays)
This only works because you are always hitting the same spot. Spinning the missile to dissipate the heat from the laser over the whole missile body could delay things just enough to get out of range. There is plenty of air cooling up there.
Given the history of these contractors of doing rigged demos... Remember back to the rocket defense system where it came out they put tracking devices into the the rocket so all it had to do was fly towards the beacon in the target? After that huge PR nightmare one would think they would learn .... and usually it is not the right lesson (make it actually work) but to learn to do a better job of not getting caught.
Everybody forget the F-22? That was lockheed martin. So, does this laser work in the rain? wouldn't be surprised... they managed to sell Americans an F-22 that didn't mix with water... I could see how falling water could mess a laser beam... And if the scattered light blinded people (a mile around) that would not only be bad for the people it protects but would violate Geneva.
None of this matters-- They will sell a $billion+ of them if they work or not and we will buy it just to subsidize their company (hoping they make something better later - because our military is all about space weapons just waiting for when the politicians change their minds.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news