ABL Ready To Test Surrogate Laser This Month

The Airborne Laser (ABL) system has rounded its major technical corners, program officials say, and will be testing a surrogate lower-power laser in flight as early as this month.

"We're on the verge of showing we have beam control and fire control," Greg Hyslop, Boeing vice president and ABL program director, said May 31. "We're on the verge of doing most of this work for real. All we have is integration issues."

Having fired a laser reliably on the ground 70 times, U.S. Air Force Col. John Daniels, director of the ABL program office, said the ABL is ready for its next real milestone, the in-flight testing of a surrogate electric laser.

The solid state electric laser mimics the wavelength and beam path of the higher energy laser chemical laser meant for the system. But the surrogate is measured in watts, and the ABL in megawatts.

"We want to make sure everything goes through the proper sequence," Daniels said May 31.

In that sequence, sensors pick up the plume of the missile, which is tracked and illuminated. The fire beacon laser senses the atmosphere and the mirrors are set to pre-distort the beams. The chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL) systems, which have been circulating slowly, gain higher and higher RPMs with the turbopumps, starting the chemical reaction needed to produce the laser. The beam is formed and directed out of the nose.

Then comes another difficult task - making sure a beam has hit its target.