Lasers To Signal Airspace Breaches

http://beta.news.yahoo.com/s/washpost/20050416/ts_washpost/a57641_2005apr15&printer=1

So the cat is out of the bag.

"The U.S. military will begin using an elaborate network of cameras and lasers next month to scan the sky over Washington and flash colored warning beams at aircraft that enter the nation's most restricted metropolitan airspace."
....
"Unlike pointers [sic!]and other eye-damaging lasers that have raised safety concerns among pilots, the military's beams are low-intensity and safe enough for the eyes yet distinctive enough to alert pilots that something's wrong, officials say."
....
"Researchers who developed the technology say the laser beam is so narrowly targeted that other nearby aircraft will not be able to see it. Curtis Davis, a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory who helped develop the system, said the beam is stronger than a laser pointer, but more diffuse. "We've taken the size of the beam and made it 15,000 times bigger," Davis said. "It's a foot in diameter."
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Blu-ray Macs at Macworld?
    ... to gun us down, and Princess Leia dodges down in the nick of time. ... to use or the scenes involving lasers being used in combat. ... in space cannot be seen because there's no dust to reflect the beam. ... Hollywood films, heroes run faster than bullets and explosions, knives ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: Lenses and reflection of light
    ... I've worked in lasers for nearly 30 years and designed military laser ... Stating a range accuracy of 0.1 inch implies a temporal resolution of 1 psec ... Typical beam divergence for a Nd:YAG laser is many milliradians, ...
    (sci.optics)
  • Re: Orion Drive space battle
    ... actually generates the laser beam. ... although x-ray FELs don't use a resonator). ... several picosecond to several hundered femptosecond pulses are ... chemical lasers have had the edge because they have ...
    (rec.arts.sf.science)
  • Re: Creating Light from invisible electromagnetic wavelengths
    ... Mixing two colors in that fashion (say ... in a non-linear device the output contains both the sum frequencies ... mix a given beam with itself which obviously produces a doubled ... Lasers are so available so inexpensively these days you can easily get ...
    (sci.physics.electromag)
  • Re: Question about IR blocking filter for green laser
    ... > coating that has poor IR reflectance at the wavelengths that matter to ... I would expect this technique to preserve your beam quality. ... That is in fact the technique used by some of the best green lasers. ...
    (sci.optics)
Quantcast