By B.C. Kessner
Guided munitions, aircraft survivability equipment, advanced sensors, and warfighter security were product areas Lockheed Martin [LMT] planned to enhance when it acquired Bothell, Wash.-based Aculite Corp. in 2008, and the new division’s fiber lasers are already making an impact, according to a Lockheed Martin executive.
“You’re going to find these miniature fiber lasers in a lot of different products,” John Wojnar, director of business development, Lockheed Martin Laser & Sensor Systems, told Defense Daily last week.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently awarded the company $6.9 million to build 15 of its One Shot laser-based sighting systems designed to improve sniper accuracy and reduce the possibility of detection, with rapid equipping force options to provide another 100 units (Defense Daily, Nov. 23).
“Not only does it provide you capabilities like in the One Shot phase 2E, but fiber lasers can be used for 25-kilowatt class DE [directed energy] systems, IRCM [infrared countermeasure] systems to defeat heat seeking missiles… and a host of medical and other applications,” Wojnar said.
For standard passive sensor systems, adding a laser enables it to see out much farther, he added. “If you use the information coming back from the laser actively, you’re able to get three dimensional information also a well…there are a lot of capabilities there from a fiber laser standpoint.”
One Shot uses a fiber laser and camera to determine wind speed and direction. It illuminates particles in the air and determines the wind profile based on the information that comes back, providing instant windage calculations that enable snipers to successfully engage targets twice as quickly, and increase the probability of a first round hit by a factor of between two and four, depending on the distance to the target.
“One Shot is a great capability for snipers…but then beyond that, you can imagine the possibilities for camp protection,” Wojnar said.
The Pentagon wants to have systems to mount on higher platforms that could be remote controlled or semi-autonomous, he said. Lockheed Martin just received a contract from the Army applied aviation technology directorate (AATD) to provide a One Shot system to support AATD’s autonomous rotorcraft sniper system, he added.
The company did some demonstrations where One Shot was mounted to a rifle in a gimbal. “That would be used for either towers or unmanned helicopters, such as the K-MAX [unmanned rotorcraft] built by one of our sister divisions,” Wojnar said.
K-MAX is the Lockheed Martin-Kaman [KAMN] offering that is competing with Boeing‘s [BA] A160T for the Marine Corps’ Cargo Unmanned Aircraft System program (Defense Daily, Nov. 5).
“It was really phenomenal…our engineering team had done such a great job designing the One Shot prototype system for the previous phase that when they went out and did the testing, even with all the shock they had to deal with the system performed flawlessly,” Wojnar said. “We had to tighten a few things, but basically bolted it on and it worked great.”
Based on what the tests proved, he saw the laser-based system potentially operated autonomously or remote controlled with a man in loop. “From a DoD perspective, they’ve got their rapid equipping force operation and one of the priorities there is camp protection…something like this would provide a great capability for camp protection.”
Aculite builds the Perseus 1.54 micron pulsed fiber laser that is a lightweight, environmentally hardened package suited for deployment in ground or aerial vehicle sensors. It also makes the Telesto pulsed fiber laser at 1.064 microns.
The division said its engineering teams are accustomed to working closely with aerospace and defense customers to provide innovative solutions to meet the most demanding industry requirements. This includes the expansion of Aculite’s Picasso line of pulsed fiber lasers designed to offer efficient, compact solutions for applications such as laser radar (LADAR), remote sensing, and standoff detection.