Are we entering into the future that Orson Welles warned us about? Defense and aerospace company Lockheed Martin invoked images of the Death Star after announcing that its new fiber-optic laser weapon is operational.
The Advanced Test High Energy Asset, or Athena, is a 30-kilowatt laser that successfully took out a small truck "from more than a mile away" during a recent field test. The weapon system was able to burn through the truck’s engine manifold while the engine was running as it sat mounted on a test manifold, the company mentioned earlier this week. The demonstration was the first field test of a beam that combined three smaller beams into one integrated 30-kilowatt fiber laser.
There’s no word from Lockheed Martin that the weapon system would be applied to battlefield usage, but the company does remark that Athena is "destined for greater things."
"This test represents the next step to providing lightweight and rugged laser weapon systems for military aircraft, helicopters, ships and trucks," Keoki Jackson, chief technology officer of Lockheed Martin, said in a statement.
Here's how the Athena system works: Spectral beam combining merges multiple laser modules to create a singular, super-powerful 30-kilowatt laser beam. "[Athena is the] highest power ever documented by a laser weapon of its type," according to a description of the system. According to Motherboard, for comparison perspective it can be summed up as: “The laser in an everyday pointer might be about 1 milliwatt, or 30 million times less powerful than Athena.”
With such positive demonstration of the laser’s military effectiveness, Lockheed envisions Athena as a de facto weapon that "protects military forces and critical infrastructure."
This is not the first time the United States military or its weapons arm has attempted to create devices utilizing laser power. In December, the U.S. Navy tested its own Laser Weapon System, or LaWS, which was professed to be ready and available to be used in combat. It uses 30-kilowatt beams of infrared light of varying intensity that are invisible to the naked eye.
