Air Force Keeps Eyes Wide Open with Airborne Laser Aircraft
July 10, 2000
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Named for the mythological giant
with 100 eyes, the U.S. Air Force’s Argus aircraft has returned to its
Albuquerque hangar after weeks of eyeballing the world’s hot spots.
"We fly at 480 mph and we make 6,000 readings per
second," said Capt. Pat Kelly, an Argus flight-test engineer.
The readings, which include temperature, air speed and
atmospheric distortion, are considered crucial to national defense,
specifically to ensuring the success of a leading anti-missile defense
system, the Air Force’s Airborne Laser Aircraft.
Being developed at Kirtland Air Force Base here, the
$1.2 billion Airborne Laser is being outfitted with a powerful laser,
computers and optics that the Air Force says will make it a deadly
adversary for tactical missiles that might be launched by rogue
nations, such as North Korea or Iraq.
Not surprisingly, Argus has made its atmospheric
measurements for the Airborne Laser in the vicinity of those
countries.
The Airborne Laser is scheduled to conduct its first
missile tests in 2003 and could be battle-ready shortly thereafter.
Although its proponents see it as the weapon of the
future, officially the Air Force advertises it as part of a national,
multi-service, anti-missile defense umbrella. Eventually, the Air
Force wants Congress to fund a fleet of Airborne Laser missile killers
at an estimated cost of $11 billion.
The Argus is a C-135E aircraft freighter that costs
about $2 million per year to operate.
Earlier this summer, Argus spent some 150 hours flying
at as high as 47,000 feet in the dark skies near the Korean Peninsula
and in the Persian Gulf, collecting huge volumes of data in the third
trip in a seasonal series aimed at detecting even minute atmospheric
changes over the course of a year.
Underneath the nose of the aircraft is a special
anemometer that uses wires finer than a human hair to measure
temperature to an accuracy of one-thousandth of a degree.
The information is currently being analyzed at the Air
Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate at Kirtland,
said Wayne Wasson, Argus flight-test program manager.
"They have all the equations," he said, noting "they
know a lot more than we do and designed all the special equipment on
board (Argus). They tell us what they need. We go get it, bring it
back, and they figure what it all means."
The answers are vital to the Airborne Laser, which
Wasson explains needs precision information on the variables in the
atmosphere to make sure its laser tracks on target and destroys an
enemy missile at the speed of light.
"It’s a high-altitude killer of missiles and it has to
find them as quickly as possible off the ground and knock them down at
low angles of incidence," he said.
Air Force officials have said they also believe they can
adapt the laser to shoot down cruise missiles that hug terrain on the
way to their targets.
Argus’ data will be put into an Airborne Laser
atmospheric library that will make it possible for the laser gunners
to fine-tune the weapon for atmospheric peculiarities around the
world, he said.
"It’ll probably all be automatic," he said. "Once they
tell the computers where they are, it will all be locked in and boom.
It’ll just go out there, get the specifics and do it."
Contact Lawrence Spohn of The Tribune in Albuquerque,
N.M., at http://www.abqtrib.com
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© 2000 Scripps Howard News Service.
by Lawrence Spohn
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