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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.
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UNCLASSIFIED//F&II. &FFll!IAI! l!l!il! 9Hl:Y achieved by laser weapons with 25 kW or 50 kW beam power, provided the energy is transmitted with good beam quality. Laser propulsion requires megawatt-class lasers which are only developed in directed energy weapons (DEW) programs. However, BSSSL beam power can be scaled up further by improving presently known gain media and doping combinations, inventing new gain media and doping combinations, by combining the beams of several lower-power devices, or a combination of all these until the ultimate optical/thermal/mechanical limit of slab gain materials is reached. BSSSL beam output power is projected to reach the multi-megawatt level within three to five years from the time of this writing (P. Zarubin, J. Albertine, and V. Hasson, private communications, 2010). Figure 20 shows DARPA's High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) as an example of a liquid-cooled bulk slab solid-state (ceramic) laser. HELLADS is designed to be light and compact enough to fit on a jet fighter or drone aircraft, and yet powerful enough to fire a 150 kW beam of energy. HELLADS makes use of a unique cooling technique to save weight and size. The high-power laser uses a liquid that has the same index of refraction as the mirrors inside the laser. That way, the laser can fire away, even while it's being cooled. The HELLADS program will deliver a 150 kW laser weapon at 2 m 3 of system volume and 600 kg of system mass (not including the prime power and cooling systems) to achieve the low specific mass (5 kg/kW) and compact size need to be mounted on small tactical airborne platforms like the C-130 transport, jet fighters, or Predator-class UAVs. The device will be built by General Atomics and the tracking system will be built by Lockheed-Martin. A bulk solid-state laser is based on a bulk piece of doped crystal, disordered or amorphous material (such as glass), glass ceramic (which is a combination of crystalline-ordered structure and glassy phases disordered structure), or mixed crystals as the laser gain medium. In most cases, the gain medium is doped either with rare- earth ions or transition metal ions. Typically, these ions replace a small percentage of other ions of similar size in the host medium. The laser-active ions have suitable optical transitions for pumping and laser emission at wavelengths where the host medium is transparent. A bulk laser resonator is often formed with laser mirrors placed around the gain medium. However, there are also laser gain media with a highly reflective dielectric mirror coating on one side, which serves as a resonator end mirror. Also, there are monolithic solid-state lasers where the beam path is entirely inside the gain medium. See Reference 30 for additional technical details. 49 UNCLASSIFIED//FOR QFFICI0b WE&i SU•b>t
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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.