Pentagon Makes New Push to Put a Laser Weapon on a Fighter Jet

Contract with Lockheed Martin comes as military leaders say they are ‘on the cusp’ of breakthrough

 Lockheed in November secured a $26 million deal from the Pentagon to develop a laser for a supersonic F-15 jet capable of disabling a missile or drone from a mile or more away
.. Air Force officials have said they want a laser weapon with an initial 50 kilowatts of power—some five times that of the largest industrial lasers—capable of destroying a target a mile or more away. The Pentagon hopes eventually to procure lasers with up to 100 or 150 kilowatts or power.
Military leaders working with Lockheed rivals such as Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. have spent a quarter century and an estimated $8 billion testing lasers and other directed-energy systems such as microwaves. None has ever been fielded or advanced to production.
.. a cheaper alternative to missiles that can be fired multiple times
.. Now, defense companies are focusing on fiber lasers first developed for the telecommunications industry that amplify and focus light from hundreds of strands into a single beam.
.. They burn up a hostile projectile’s electronic systems rather than destroy it like a missile.
.. The energy cost of $1 to $5 a shot compares with $100,000 to $200,000 for a defensive missile.

Europe unveils world’s most powerful X-ray laser

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Facility in Hamburg will help recreate conditions deep inside the sun, unravel ways to make new antibiotics and even create a new form of diamond

Unlike a conventional camera, though, everything imaged by the X-ray laser is obliterated – its beam is 100 times more intense than if all the sunlight hitting the Earth’s surface were focused onto a single thumbnail.

.. The European beam is more powerful, but most significantly has a far higher pulse rate than either of its predecessors.“They can send 100 pulses out per second, we can send 27,000,” said Robert Feidenhan’l, chairman of the European XFEL management board.

This matters because to study chemical reactions or biological processes, the X-ray strobe is used to capture flickering snapshots of the same system at different time-points that can be stitched together into a film sequence.

At XFEL, scientists will be able to collect data at a far quicker rate and miss less of the action between shots.

.. Previously, scientists have been able to measure the crystal structure of the beginning and end-products. But, according to Orville, this is like trying to understand an Olympic high-jump contest based on pictures of the athlete on the bench before the jump and lying on the mat afterwards.

“We’re trying to get the enzyme at the top of that high bar,” he said. “We hope we’ll be able to see the very complex reaction cycle including some of the short-lived intermediates that have never been seen before.”

.. Another planned experiment will aim to reveal the process by which molecules capture light and turn it into energy during photosynthesis. “You might use that as an input to make an artificial device to do the same,” said Feidenhan’l. “That’s my dream.”

.. “The pressures you can produce are enormous; 10 million atmospheres and above, which is more than three times the pressure at the centre of the Earth.”