Dale's Program Lases a Missile

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Many of you know a little bit about the program Dale works on; for those of you who aren't familiar with his work, here's a brief synopsis, as I understand it:

The program is designed to shoot missiles out of the sky. Presumably, the missiles will be launched by bad guys and aimed at good guys. This works by having a very large airplane (a modified Boeing 747 that contains a laser instead of seats and such) detect a missile after it has been launched, track the missile as it flies, and shoot a very high-power laser at the missile to make the missile blow up before it reaches the good guys.

Sounds simple, right? Well, Dale explained to me that it is actually a very complicated problem, for several reasons:
1. The missile is moving, and the airplane is moving. So the laser airplane has to track the missile as both are moving, at different velocities and in different directions.
2. The missile is a pretty dark item -- it isn't as if the missile has headlights that the airplane can "look" at; instead, the laser airplane has to illuminate the missile in order to see it, and has to continue illuminating it as both are moving in the atmosphere.
3. The laser airplane is really far away from the missile (more than 50 kilometers), and the missile is pretty narrow (a few feet across). This is like seeing a motorcycle (without its headlights on) from over thirty miles away.
4. The laser has to travel across that distance through the atmosphere, rather than through a vacuum. Every molecule of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, argon, and carbon dioxide that the laser encounters will distort the laser beam slightly, making it pretty diffuse by the time it reaches the missile. To compensate for this, the laser has to be extremely powerful as it leaves the laser airplane and Dale's group has to apply "atmospheric compensation" to the laser to correct for that.

More information about the program can be found here: http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/abl/index.html or at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

Dale has been working really hard lately to demonstrate that the laser can illuminate, track, and fire a high-powered laser at an actual missile for long enough to blow it up. And recently, they did just that.

Here is a video showing the airplane firing a laser at a missile. The missile is the really bright dot that starts in the lower left; the airplane is the bright double dot that starts in the upper right of the screen. You should be able to identify the laser. The video was shot in the infrared part of the spectrum; the laser isn't visible to the human eye.



By the way, this was a demonstration of the capabilities of the laser, with a missile that wasn't armed and was launched by the US, from the US, toward an uninhabited part of the ocean. No bad guys were involved in the making of this video.

And no, the laser cannot be used to pop popcorn. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius)