High Powered Military Laser Test a Success
Recent news stories provide a few details about an apparently successful test of a military laser that has been in the works for some time now. They plan to deploy this infrared laser from the nose of an aircraft in order to neutralize missle threats. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grunman are participating in the project, with plans to test fire the main laser while in flight sometime during August 2009.
Because details are scarce in all news reports of the laser test, it is hard to say what type of laser it is. In the past chemical lasers have been the most powerful tested for military application. A friend of mine did work on something like this at Research Electro Optics - an optical component manufacturer. He took part in the manufacturing process for stackable scaling laser amplification crystals with specially design thin film coatings (applied in house). They were supposedly in the 3rd stage of testing out of 4. This particular stage focused on creating and testing a 200kW output laser using these laser amplification crystals. Although… this seems like a rather high output when considering other literature on these types of lasers.
Check out that video, though.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 6:51 pm and is filed under General, High Energy, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
