Thursday - January 20, 2011

It this isn’t BS then it’s a miracle

The Navy has passed a major milestone in its quest to build an incredibly powerful new anti-air raygun.

Scientists with the Navy’s Office of Naval Research have demonstrated a prototype system capable of producing from thin air the electrons needed to generate ultrapowerful, “megawatt-class" laser beams for the agency’s next-generation system.

“The injector performed as we predicted all along,” said Dinh Nguyen, senior project leader for the Free Electron Laser (FEL) program at the Los Alamos National Lab, N.M. “But until now, we didn’t have the evidence to support our models. We were so happy to see our design, fabrication and testing efforts finally come to fruition.”

He said the group is hoping to set a world record with the futuristic new weapon—which could be the Holy Grail of military lasers.
...
Quentin Saulter, FEL program manager for the Navy’s research arm, said the implications of the FEL’s progress are monumental. “This is a major leap forward for the program and for FEL technology throughout the Navy,” Saulter said. “The fact that the team is nine months ahead of schedule provides us plenty of time to reach our goals by the end of 2011.”

The research team hopes to have a full-power prototype by 2018, which would have the ability to instantly blast targets in the sky.

Navy ships have become vulnerable in modern times to supersonic missiles because of their slower defense systems, the agency worries. “The FEL is expected to provide future U.S. Naval forces with a near-instantaneous laser ship defense in any maritime environment throughout the world,” Saulter said.

Moreover, because future ships may very well use a form of electronic propulsion, there would be a readily available supply of electrons to power the raygun.

The Navy has been seeking its “Holy Grail” free electron laser (FEL) weapon for a while now, but it would rather you think of it more as a multipurpose laser platform than a death ray. While the Navy’s ship-borne FEL, currently under development at Boeing, will certainly be used to knock incoming threats out of the sky, naval officers really want a platform that can also be used for tracking, communications, target designation, disruption, time-of-flight location, and a variety of other tasks.
...
The ability to shift wavelengths means that unlike other lasers--including the solid-state bad boy Raytheon used to knock a UAV out of the air from the deck of a ship earlier this year--an FEL system can adjust that wavelength for a variety of tasks. Further, it could run off a vessel’s power source rather than requiring its own, so it wouldn’t need to stop and reload.
...
Of course, the Navy still wants its laser to target and destroy incoming threats, and therein lies the challenge. The lower power threshold for a weaponized laser of this nature is more or less 100 kilowatts ...

Just pointing out that a megawatt class unit is 10 times more powerful than the 100 kilowatts necessary to do the job. Hey, maybe this thing will be able to kill satellites too!

This revolutionary technology allows for multiple payoffs to the warfighter. The ability to control the strength of the beam provides for graduated lethality, and the use of light versus an explosive munition, provides for low per engagement and life cycle costs. In fact, it provides an effective alternative to using expensive missiles against low value targets. Not worrying about propulsion and working at the speed of light allows for precise engagement and the resulting low collateral damage. Speed-of-light engagement also allows for a rapid reaction to moving and/or swarming time critical and swarming targets.

The Navy’s Megawatt Laser Weapon Takes a Big Leap Forward with Powerful New Electron Injector
It’s unclear which is the bigger news coming out of the Office of Naval Research; the fact that the Navy’s Free Electron Laser (FEL) program has demonstrated an injector capable of producing the necessary electrons to fuel a megawatt-class laser beam, or the fact that a next-generation future weapon under development by the military is months ahead of schedule. Both are good news for the Navy, which might begin lasing threats out of the sky sooner than it anticipated.

I wonder if the power source can be made small enough and light enough to fit in, and bring back to life, that successful airplane based laser system Obama canceled. Or, if, now that this navy system has shown enormous progress, he’ll cancel it out of hand as well. Just like he promised to do during his election campaign.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/20/2011 at 04:32 PM   
Filed Under: • Military •  
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