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2006 Airborne Laser (ABL) Overview
Description & Purpose: The Airborne Laser (ABL)
provides speedoflight
capability to destroy ballistic
missiles in their early stages of flight.
Customer: U.S. Missile Defense Agency
General Characteristics: The ABL program places a megawattclass,
highenergy
Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) on a modified Boeing 747400F
aircraft to detect,
track and destroy all classes of ballistic missiles in their boost phase of flight. ABL also
can pass information on launch sites, target tracks and predicted impact points to other
layers of the global ballistic missile defense system.
Boeing provides the aircraft, battle management and overall systems integration and
testing. Northrop Grumman supplies the highenergy
laser, and Lockheed Martin
provides the beam control/fire control system.
Background: Since 2004, the Airborne Laser program has made continual and
significant progress:
In late 2004, the Airborne Laser team achieved two key milestones: “first light” of the
COIL in ground testing, and “first flight” of the first ABL aircraft with the battle
management and beam control/fire control systems.
In 2005, two more major goals were accomplished. The program completed passive
flight tests that demonstrated the performance of the battle management and beam
control/fire control systems. The program also fired the highenergy
laser at lethal power
and duration in ground tests.
In 2006, the team completed modifications to the ABL aircraft to accept the COIL’s six
modules, and integrated ABL’s two solidstate
illuminator lasers into the beam control/fire
control system onboard the aircraft. The illuminator lasers are used to track hostile
ballistic missiles and measure the amount of atmospheric distortion between the aircraft
and the target. The team also completed active ground tests of the beam control/fire
control system, including numerous firings of the illuminators on the ground, exercising
all elements of the ABL engagement sequence.
In 2007, the program successfully demonstrated in active flight tests that ABL’s battle
management and beam control/fire control systems can complete the full series of steps
required to support a ballistic missile engagement. During these tests, which concluded
Aug. 23, the modified Boeing 747400F
operated from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.,
and used its infrared sensors to find an instrumented target board located on a U.S. Air
Force "Big Crow" test aircraft. ABL's battle management system then issued engagement
and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system. The beam
control/fire control system acquired the target with sensors in the nose mounted turret
and fired its two illuminator lasers to actively track the target and measure atmospheric
conditions. ABL then fired a lowpower
surrogate laser at the Big Crow, successfully
simulating a target engagement.
After the team installs the highenergy
laser in the aircraft, it will conduct an extensive
series of systemlevel
ground and flight tests, building toward an intercept test against an
inflight
ballistic missile in 2009.
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