CEPA8 JP8.11 Laser Beam Steering - System Study

This report contains a system study related to a CEPA8 collaborative six nation project on "Laser Beam Steering". The main objectives of the study were to identify potential benefits of using innovative beam steering and aberration correction techniques (adaptive optics) in a beam director for a DIRCM system. The study addresses issues such as scenarios, influence of perturbations, significant performance parameters, figure of merits, different architectures and performance calculations. Interactions between subsystems and components are also discussed. The outputs from the study contain a discussion on critical technical issues and possible performance improvements with implementation of adaptive optics. In addition to the DIRCM application air-to-ground targeting is briefly discussed.