Airborne Laser completes “First Light”
Lt. General Henry A. “Trey” Obering, Missile Defense Agency director, announced the first successful firing of the megawatt-class Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) of the Airborne Laser (ABL) program since it was installed on board the YAL-1A demonstrator aircraft. Although the test lasted only a fraction of a second, it validated the successful year-long integration of the High Energy Laser on board the highly modified 747-400 aircraft.
The firing of the COIL followed a series of laser activation and readiness tests that verified the operation of each of the newly installed subsystems. The laser was fired into an onboard calorimeter, a test instrument used to capture the laser energy and measure performance characteristics of the beam.
The success of this test clears the path for continued ground testing of the High Energy Laser to include longer duration lasing and lasing through the ABL Beam Control/Fire Control system.
ABL is being developed as a future element of the US’s ballistic missile defense system, and the first to use directed energy to destroy ballistic missiles in their “boost” phase of flight. Although significant work remains before flight tests can begin, this phase of COIL testing represents a major step toward the ABL program’s planned lethal demonstration against a boosting missile in 2009.
“The start of laser firings marks the completion of a 10-month effort to install and integrate the high-energy laser and prepare it for testing,” said Mike Rinn, Boeing’s vice president and program director of ABL. “Using Lean process improvements, a joint contractor team reduced laser installation time on the aircraft to about a third of the time required when the laser was installed in the system integration laboratory at Edwards.”
ABL’s high-energy laser will undergo a series of additional ground tests, building toward lethal levels of duration and power. The laser first will be fired into an onboard calorimeter, which captures the beam and measures its power. The laser beam then will be sent through the beam control/fire control system, exiting the aircraft through the nose-mounted turret. To prepare for the tests, modifications to the ABL hangar at Edwards were completed, and additional integration testing of the beam control/fire control system was completed.
Ground firings of the laser will be followed by flight tests of the entire ABL weapon system, culminating in an airborne intercept test against a ballistic missile in 2009.
The program has amassed a series of accomplishments over the past several years. In 2005, the high-energy laser demonstrated lethal levels of duration and power in the system integration laboratory at Edwards. And in 2007, ABL completed numerous flight tests that demonstrated its ability to track an airborne target, measure and compensate for atmospheric conditions and deliver a surrogate high-energy laser’s simulated lethal beam on the target.