This new laboratory provides a clean room environment (Class 10,000) for optical elements. The lab facilitates a beam control testbed for high energy laser systems with research topics on adaptive optics, jitter control, structure and optics optimization, and testbed development.

The purpose of the testbed is to develop beam control technologies for High Energy Laser (HEL) systems. The area of research includes optical jitter control; wavefront sensing and correction techniques; mirror alignment and shape control; and acquisition, tracking, and pointing using adaptive and robust control techniques.

The advanced Inertial Reference Unit (aIRU) is an inertially stabilized low power optical source with embedded inertial attitude knowledge. The aIRU unit projects an ultra-stable optical reference beam and maintains pointing accuracies to a specified accuracy level.