Anti-Missile Laser Weapon Successfully Tested 636
xPertCodert writes "A latest attempt to build a futuristic laser weapon appears to be a success.
Joint Israeli-US developed laser destroyed a large caliber rocket in a latest New Mexico test. The press release also contains links to some interesting video and photo material, related to THEL (Tactical High Energy Lasers) defense systems."
videos (Score:5, Informative)
WMP or QT are availabe.
Re:Invisible beams? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Invisible beams? (Score:2, Informative)
It's a tactical weapon, not strategic. (Score:5, Informative)
Now, the Airborne Laser was developed as SDI, but it only covers an area of a 100 mile circle around which it's deployed. That's not going to generally help against a large country...but instead was designed for actions against megalomanical 3rd world dictatorships, like say, North Korea.
Re:General question... (Score:3, Informative)
Congratulations, you just made the economic case for this device.
Re:Uh Huh (Score:3, Informative)
Diffraction limits the degree to which the laser can be focused. The fixed-site version of THEL (the big, stationary version) has an aperture of less than a metre. Even in near-IR, that gives it a divergence of about one part in a million, meaning a kilometre away the spot is going to be a metre or two wide. Farther away, bigger area painted. Put retro-reflective material on any reasonable fraction of the missile's surface, and you'll get enough retro-reflected light to be decidedly unhealthy for anything near the THEL system. The missile will certainly still be destroyed, but THEL's a lot more expensive than the missile.
You don't need anything complicated for the reflector. Stamp a cube pattern into the missile's surface and plate it with aluminum (or gold, if you want the extra fraction of a percent IR reflectivity), and coat it with something IR-transparent to avoid wrecking the missile's aerodynamics. Poof; laser-hostile missile.
Laser weapons are lousy on the battlefield for a number of reasons. Mainly, the problem is that they're very power-hungry even for relatively efficient versions, they need to have massive overkill in order to be able to harm reflective targets, they need to have even more massive overkill in order to be able to harm a target despite having a beam larger than the target at any significant range, and it's easy to retro-reflect them and ruin the day of any poorly-shielded operator of the laser weapon.
Guns (and other kinetic weapons) are very efficient to deploy and harder to shield against.
The best really effective anti-missile system would probably be a system that used a laser just as a designator to paint the missile, and a gun firing "guided bullet" type shells that adjusted their course to intercept the painted missile (targetting is the main problem with trying to shoot down a missile with kinetic weapons). A laser only works if you don't mind the massive overhead (e.g. if you have a lot more resources in the field than your opponent).
direct video link... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Invisible beams? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. I've seen pictures of the effect, possible from as early as the late 1960s. Turns the air in the beam into a plasma.
The problem is, that plasma is generally much less transparent to the laser than the air was (although that wasn't perfectly transparent or it wouldn't have absorbed any laser light), so the beam wastes its energy close to the laser emitter.
The goal with these things is to come up with laser frequencies at which the air is as near to invisible as possible, so that all the energy goes to the target (and you have less to worry about diffraction effects, etc.)
(One exception is if you want to ionize the air so that it will conduct an electric charge, to make something like an optical Taser. Phasers on stun, anyone?)
Re:This is the first real laser weapon (Score:2, Informative)
Also see here [af.mil], here [popsci.com], and here [airforce-technology.com] for more info.
This is personally really exciting, being in the USAF and having a chance to actually fly on this thing... makes me giddy.
I can just see it now: "ACTIVATE THE LAYYYYYZZZZZEEEEERRRR!!!!!!!"
Re:Uh Huh (Score:2, Informative)
Remember how light works? It's not bounced. It's absorbed and re-emitted. Even a *very* good mirror will vaporize if something is the slightest thing wrong with conditions like this.
Missles with aluminum foil will never work. It would be cheaper just to spam rockets.
Re:General question... (Score:5, Informative)
One of those apparently sourceless quotes made all the more suspect by the attribution itself. The United States does not have a parliamentary system - the only "ministers" in the US are charged with church congregations. Second, the Department of Defense did not exist until 1947, and was not so named until 1949 - Newton D. Baker was Secretary of the War Department under Woodrow Wilson, from 1916 to 1921.
Yeah, I know - offtopic. Whatever.
Re:A few flaws (Score:2, Informative)
I suppose that merely heating the slug to a molten blob of metal doesn't really help, does it, if that blob is still going to impact you soon.
- Peter
Re:this is silly (Score:1, Informative)
And I'd also like to add that ordinary bathroom mirrors can reflect megawatts of *power* without any difficulty, if they're big enough and the duration of the incident light is short enough. The issue is not power, but absorbed energy per unit area - i.e. (incident power * duration of the pulse * absorption coefficient) per unit area. Note that the intensity of the beam is only a few watts/mm^2, or several orders of magnitude lower than medical lasers used for corneal surgery and so on. It would need to dwell on the reflecting target for a pretty long time, and dump a significant amount of energy, in order to do significant damage to the reflector.
I don't believe they've indicated what the nature of the target surface was. I'm guessing that they were painted matt black.
Re:this is silly (Score:1, Informative)
Try taking an optics 200 or physics 200 class.
The reflected photons don't just "bounce off" the material. They're first absorbed, and then re-emitted. If that initial absorbing packs more energy than it can handle, then your mirror goes kaput. This is why high-powered laser systems can't use your standard pocket mirror material.
Re:General question... (Score:4, Informative)
The next time you want to make a call on your cell phone, see your baby on an ultrasound monitor, or you need an MRI scan to detect the cancer in your body, Israel has done something nice for you.
Israel is not a money pit. It is an investment! It pays back dividends every day. On the battle field, on the farm, in the hospital, in the research lab, in the plane, at the computer, and much more. Every country of the world is being blessed by the things coming out of Israel, from agricultural innovations to medical equipment inventions to biotechnology and pharmaceuticals to telecommunications to intelligence on terrorist plans.
RTFA, for one. Israel benefits us in many ways, mostly with their brain power. We use a lot of their technology for our defense. U.S. troops were trained for urban combat by the IDF. Did you know that Saddam's Iraq used to have a nuclear reactor? It was destroyed by Israel in 1991. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia shuttle disaster, helped to destroy the reactor. The world should profusely thank Israel for sparing the world from having to deal with a North Korea in the Middle East. They did something very "nice for us."
Israel is the West's buffer zone in the war on terror. They were fighting the war for us before the Sleeping Giant realized that IslamoNazis were pulling it into a war. Israel is fighting at the front lines for America and Europe and the civilized world. They live at the front lines. Israel is the beacon of intelligence and enlightenment in a vast Islamic wasteland of medieval warlords and clan feuds. It is very much in our interest, for security reasons if for no other, to help Israel financially and otherwise.
Israel, the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world's population, can make claim to the following:
The cell phone was developed in Israel by Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel.
Most of the Windows NT operating system was developed by Microsoft-Israel.
The Pentium MMX and Pentium M chip technologies were designed in Israel at Intel.
Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.
Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R&D facilities outside the US in Israel.
The technology for AOL Instant Messenger was developed in 1996 by four young Israelis.
An Israeli company was the first to develop and install a large-scale solar-powered and fully functional electricity generating plant, in southern California's Mojave desert.
The first PC anti-virus software was developed in Israel in 1979. With more than 3,000 high-tech companies and start-ups, Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies in the world (apart from the Silicon Valley).
In response to serious water shortages, Israeli engineers and agriculturalists developed a revolutionary drip irrigation system to minimize the amount of water used to grow crops.
Israel has the highest percentage in the world of home computers per capita.
Israel leads the world in the number of scientists and technicians in the workforce, with 145 per 10,000, as opposed to 85 in the U.S., over 70 in Japan, and less than 60 in Germany. With over 25% of its work force employed in technical professions. Israel places first in this category as well.
Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world.
Israel produces more scientific papers per capita than any other nation by a large margin - 109 per 10,000 people - as well as one of the highest per capita rates of patents filed.
In proportion to its population, Israel has the largest number of startup companies in the world. In absolute terms, Israel has the largest number of startup companies than any other country in the world, except the US (3,500 companies mostly in hi-tech).
Israel is ranked #2 in the wor
Re:General question... (Score:3, Informative)
First of all you are talking about trade. Trade deficits are bad. They help them more then they help us.
I am talking about us foreign aid. Not trade. Foreign aid is charity given by the US because people are destitute, starving or because we feel somehow justified in giving our money away.
Nobody has ever convinced me that giving charity to israel is justified. They are not destitute, they are not starving, they don't need our help and they give us back nothing in return.
Re:General question... (Score:2, Informative)