Documents / Report
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 1 November 2010, was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It describes nanosatellite technologies and proposes launching nanosats into orbit with laser Lightcraft propulsion. It also covers a weapon mission selection study and multi-megawatt laser options. The author recommends that the Department of Defense and NASA bring Lightcraft R&D back to the United States and restart the X-50LR flight demonstration program.
“Masse”33 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//F&A 8FFl&I.«1k WliEii a,.klf In order to launch a laser-propelled Lightcraft nanosat or picosat from the ground, sea, or air, it will be necessary to control and steer the high-energy laser (HEL) beam, while at the same time making real-time adjustments to account for platform motion, optical train and atmospheric effects on beam propagation, so that the beam maintains high quality, low-loss, precision contact with the Lightcraft from launch all the way up to LEO. While the atmospheric effects on laser beam propagation were briefly discussed in the Lightcraft Nanosatellite Configuration section of Chapter 2, a more in-depth examination of this phenomenon can be found in Reference 32. In what follows, we briefly discuss what a HEL beam control system is designed to do and what innovations were recently developed by the various DoD directed energy weapons programs that are just now being successfully tested and deployed. A beam control system is designed to:tt • Acquire and precisely track a designated target. • Handles the HEL beam emitted from the laser: - Aligns the HEL beam to the optical train's axis - from the laser resonator to the beam director's exit aperture. - Safely relays the HEL beam through the optical train with minimal loss of energy and beam quality. • Expands the HEL beam and focuses it at the range of the target. • Places and maintains the HEL beam on the desired target's aimpoint. • Corrects for beam quality degradations in the optical train or the atmosphere (if needed). HEL weapons usually have high-power optical trains containing more than a dozen mirrors. However, these systems need to be far more compact with minimal high- power trains. As directed energy weapon applications begin to employ smaller HEL systems, the size, weight and complexity of the accompanying beam control system has come down as well. The typical HEL beam control system includes:++ 1) a gimbaled beam director, 2) tracking and pointing functions, 3) adaptive optics, 4) acquisition sensors, and 5) target illuminators. Solutions have been recently developed to drive towards a smaller, lighter and simpler beam control system while considering the entire end-to-end system architecture. Existing beam control solutions are robust but large and complex. The technical strides achieved in the past 20 years in wavefront sensing, aperture sharing elements, beam tracking and beam correcting provide new tools to offer a simplified low mirror count beam control system while retaining the ruggedness of function necessary for a laser weapon. Figure 33 and Figure 34 show schematics of a notional inertially-stabilized pointer/tracker mount and beam control system that was developed by NAVSEA's DE&EWS Program. ,-o. Kiel, Directed Energy Systems Symposium Short Course, Naval Post-Graduate School, Monterey, CA, 2010. 10 D. Kiel, Directed Energy Systems Symposium Short Course, Naval Post-Graduate School, Monterey, CA, 2010. UNCLASSIFIED//F8A 8FFI&II k WEEii ,u1uc 63
Not linked to a story yet.
Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 77 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.