A SERIOUS flaw has emerged in the $1.1 billion US project to use powerful airborne laser weapons to shoot down enemy missiles, says an Israeli academic.
Nathan Kopeika of Ben-Gurion University told a conference in Florida last week that he believes engineers working on the Airborne Laser (ABL) project have overlooked the effect of tiny dust particles in the atmosphere, called aerosols. These could scatter and weaken the laser beam, making it incapable of destroying incoming missiles.
The ABL project, initiated by the US Air Force in 1996, plans to convert Boeing 747 jets into flying laser cannons that would patrol the skies scanning for enemy missiles.
If Kopeika's claim is correct then the atmosphere could throw a spanner in the works and make the lasers all but useless. "We found that, after a propagation of 100 kilometres, aerosols can widen a laser beam up to a cross section one ...
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