The US Army installed a low-power laser weapon on the “Stryker” wheeled armored vehicle, and successfully conducted a laser weapon attack on the drone. The “Stryker” armored vehicle is equipped with a new “mobile expeditionary high-energy laser” (MEHEL 2.0) system that increases its power from 2 kW to 5 kW. In the test, laser weapons successfully shot down small fixed-wing UAVs and quadrotors, which confirmed the feasibility of installing laser pointer and radars on armored vehicle platforms. Radars can detect and display targets, significantly improving the accuracy and effectiveness of strikes.
The military official in charge of the test said that the main purpose of the test is to let military policy makers understand the current level of development of US military laser weapons, evaluate the technology of hard killing drones, and show how laser weapons respond to single and multiple Goals. While appreciating the excellent performance of laser weapons attacking unmanned aerial vehicles, the military also stated that the limitations of laser weapon power increase were exposed during the test.
The “Stryker” 8-8 wheeled armored vehicle is the main battle equipment of the US Army. It has strong firepower, battlefield mobility, survivability and versatility. A “protector” remote control weapon station is installed, equipped with M2 type 12.7 Millimeter heavy machine gun, MK-19 type 40 mm automatic grenade launcher and other weapons. After installing laser weapons in the future, the “Stryker” armored vehicle can provide certain air defense capabilities for the US military brigade-level combat troops.
One of the assertions about the utility of ultrafast pulsed lasers is the existence of wavelength-independent absorption. In the shorter pulse width range, this may be true, but at a pulse width of 10 ps, the quality of parts processed using infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths will almost always be different.
The instrument developed by the CMI method has many advantages, such as compact structure, fast measurement speed and high accuracy. It can be placed at any position in the driver to perform real-time precision detection of the beam wavefront. It overcomes the shortcomings of the existing direct imaging method and Hartman sensor, and solves the problem that the intermediate and high spatial frequencies can only be measured offline by the interferometer. At present, this method has been successfully tested on the XXX national green laser pointer device, and the near and far field light field distribution of a single pulse is measured, and the near field resolution of 500 μm is achieved.