4 ms·
But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.
by cm2187 7mo ago
But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.
- amelius 7mo agoI suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets.
- esseph 7mo agoLaser TDMA! :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-division_multiple_access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-division_multiple_access
- voidUpdate 7mo agoIf starlink satellites get laser downlink, it might work :P
- cm2187 7mo agolaser downlink to one point, isn't it? Not to 300 moving aircrafts at once.
- eqvinox 7mo agoYou can probably do phased arrays. (It might already be a phased array.)
- mohaine 7mo agoPretty sure phased array LASERs are not yet a thing.
- eqvinox 7mo agoYeah but this is research, if they're to come up somewhere, where else would it be?
- aidenn0 7mo agoLasers are coherent emitters; you can definitely make interference patterns with them, so I don't see why LASER MIMO wouldn't be possible, in theory.
- buildbot 7mo agoI was not sure, but they are! https://cga.anu.edu.au/research/activities/laser-beam-steering-subsystem-optical-phased-array https://cga.anu.edu.au/research/activities/laser-beam-steeri... https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/excalibur https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/excalibur I guess in some ways even the fancy multi diode fiber lasers are phased arrays, just with the single goal of higher output power.
- axus 7mo agoLooks like these are in early development and nowhere near ready like this test was.