By Ann Roosevelt
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) yesterday was to begin tests on a software fix aimed to repair an error causing early shutdown of the laser beam during a Sept. 1 test of the Airborne Laser Test Bed (ALTB).
“While we continue analyzing the failure, preliminary indications are that a communication software error within the system that controls the laser beam caused misalignment of the beam,” the MDA said in a Sept. 10 statement. “The ALTB safety system detected this shift and immediately shut down the high energy laser.”
The objective of the Sept. 1 Flight Experiment Laser (FEL-01b) mission was for the ALTB to destroy a liquid-fuel, short-range ballistic missile during its boost phase (Defense Daily, Sept. 9). During the mission at the Point Mugu flight test range off the Southern California coast, the Boeing [BA] 747-400F flying laser laboratory detected and tracked the target.
The fix has been extensively tested in the lab and in flight tests will be used with the Airborne Diagnostic Target, an MDA spokeswoman said.
However, MDA said, “the experiment terminated early when corrupted beam control software steered the high energy laser slightly off center.”
MDA plans to resume flight experiments beginning with tests of the software repair leading to a lethal shootdown experiment involving a solid-fuel target missile by the end of this month.
A mid-October experiment is in the planning stages that will involve lasing a solid-fuel missile at three times the range of last February’s successful destruction of a liquid- fuel missile (Defense Daily, Feb. 11, 2009).
Boeing is the ALTB prime contractor, providing the plane, battle management system and overall systems integration and testing. Northrop Grumman [NOC] designed and built the Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser, and Lockheed Martin [LMT] developed the beam control/fire control system.