The Lab

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.

HEL Beam Control Testbed

The purpose of the testbed is to develop beam control technologies for High Energy Laser (HEL) systems. The areas 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.

Advanced Inertial Reference Unit (aIRU)

The advance 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.