System and Method for Laser-Induced Plasma for Infrared Homing Missile Countermeasure

There is a recent US Patent filed by the Navy which seems rather intriguing to me.

US Patent

Has anybody observed odd follow on plasma effects nearby from certain aircraft types?

I personally believe that generally related systems, perhaps with multiple emitters, might have something to do with some of the UAP sightings which are claimed to be unexplainable.

(I haven't been back around here in many years, I hope this & Science forum may stay free of farcical conspiracy theories)

a reply to: mbkennel

Hey mbkennel- good to see you.....

Yeah - there are a couple of threads where a few of us have suggested LIPF's/similar
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I posted the patent here: www.abovetopsecret.com... back in May.

The main sticking point seems to be getting people to realise you can reflect/absorb/amplify/scatter EM radiation using tuned exotic matter and then coming up with a sensible way to deliver:

OTH/none local functionality
A stealthy array/power source to facilitate persistent, on station presentation.

As I understand it.....if you can tinker with the epsilon and mu of the "manifestation" you can generate whatever radar results you want..... but I cant help thinking this is a discrete application of wider systems/technology (phase conjugates, none linear weirdness, plasma waveguides etc etc etc) ...

a reply to: Jukiodone
If I understood the patent, it's now possible to create plasma at remote distances by using microwave and laser technology (maser).

The laser punches a pathway for the microwaves so they don't stray and they found a way to interrupt the beam, maybe by crossing a second one and excite the air molecules so they turn into plasma.

That in return will be a decoy for homing in infrared missiles that could be even moving into the path of the missle. Ultimately if the plasma is hot enough, we could destroy the missile with it, by moving the plasma region into the pathway.

A fast enough system could churn out a few of these regions and it would work like flares from airplanes, just that they pop into existence where ever they are needed.

originally posted by: ThatDamnDuckAgain
a reply to: Jukiodone
If I understood the patent, it's now possible to create plasma at remote distances by using microwave and laser technology (maser).

The laser punches a pathway for the microwaves so they don't stray and they found a way to interrupt the beam, maybe by crossing a second one and excite the air molecules so they turn into plasma.

That in return will be a decoy for homing in infrared missiles that could be even moving into the path of the missle. Ultimately if the plasma is hot enough, we could destroy the missile with it, by moving the plasma region into the pathway.

A fast enough system could churn out a few of these regions and it would work like flares from airplanes, just that they pop into existence where ever they are needed.

its the other way around the maser/microwave beam clears the air of clouds and when you shoot the laser at super fast speeds to create the bloom effect inside the microwave beams center. not only would you be hitting the missile with microwave energy but now you can more than likely burn its seeker out via microwave or laser.

using some radar trickery and this method you could spoof radars into seeing a lot of things but it does not make you invisible

a reply to: penroc3
My bad, I understood it from other articles that a maser is a laser and microwave device, where the laser is used as a wave guide for the microwaves. That would make the laser the medium and the microwave the power carrying component.



I might need to read a bit.

"Invisibility" would be a separate discussion .... and we haven't really got any credible reports of craft suddenly going invisible.

If you had one of these LIPF's and stopped directing energy to the desired co-ordinate- presumably it would appear to either dissapear (via dissipation) or maybe you could make it look it likes it accelerates before dissipation with a quick manoeuvre....

Can never find something when you are looking but we had this discussion a while ago and think it was Bedlam who elucidated the pros/cons and challenges.
Pretty sure he indicated they were toying with the idea of live deployments in the Bush era (not sure whether it was Sr. or Jr.)

Bit confused about the invisibility talk, I did not think of it or wrote about it, did I use a wrong vocabulary?

originally posted by: Jukiodone
"Invisibility" would be a separate discussion .... and we haven't really got any credible reports of craft suddenly going invisible.

If you had one of these LIPF's and stopped directing energy to the desired co-ordinate- presumably it would appear to either dissapear (via dissipation) or maybe you could make it look it likes it accelerates before dissipation with a quick manoeuvre....

Can never find something when you are looking but we had this discussion a while ago and think it was Bedlam who elucidated the pros/cons and challenges.
Pretty sure he indicated they were toying with the idea of live deployments in the Bush era (not sure whether it was Sr. or Jr.)

My feeling is that the Navy ship-borne systems, instead of on-aircraft, might use two directed energy generators, and only the intersection of those would have high enough electric fields to ionize air to get the discharge.

An intersection could be more accurately steered with a persistent target at the desired location, and could account for the perceived "supersonic speeds" of the UAPs. If you want to fight Gozer, gotta cross the beams.

I imagine the primary use case would be to present a more appealing target to the infrared & EM seeker of an incoming missile, and then lead it along like a carrot in front of a mule into missing its target, crashing into the ocean, or intersecting with your own bullets or counter-missile.

The patent discusses specifically tuning infrared frequencies to match a desired effective spectrum, presumably this would be done for ships as well, or to protect vulnerable support aircraft like tankers & AWACS.

Modern missile seekers have some reasonable intelligence, like a multi-mode seeker (RF & IR) requires a certain combination of infrared output, size and and radar return, and the target needs to behave in a certain way for it to be plausible as a real target. The plasma would be electrically conductive at radio frequencies because of the free charges, being a reflecting radar blip as well as simultaneously emitting infrared. If this can be further steered around into plausible trajectories mimicking ships or aircraft that would make it a successful decoy, and if the system can be sufficiently powered, one that would not run out of supplies.

I'm not sure the systems would be able to destroy the missiles directly with the directed energy, particularly as high-end adversaries missiles would be well engineered against such measures in contrast to commercial inexpensive drone technology.

For example, consider a hypersonic warhead---such a thing intrinsically needs to be able to withstand extremely hot near-orbital re-entry speeds and sustained heating, and such materials are well established by ICBM development. Any aadded flux from a laser or microwave would be like a puppy's paw by comparison, insignificant. Tricking the terminal guidance seems to be the only option.

Anyway, the UAP report obviously doesn't discuss any of this kind of possibility directly, but it would be dereliction if Navy would not be working on such things. Similarly I think Chinese intelligence is likely well aware of these developments as well and probably working on their own. They have made great advances in high powered laser technology.

originally posted by: mbkennel
Has anybody observed odd follow on plasma effects nearby from certain aircraft types?

I personally believe that generally related systems, perhaps with multiple emitters, might have something to do with some of the UAP sightings which are claimed to be unexplainable.

(I haven't been back around here in many years, I hope this & Science forum may stay free of farcical conspiracy theories)

Welcome back, I was wondering what happened to you when I didn't see you post for so long.

The intersecting lasers is a possibility for UAP maneuvers which a solid nuts and bolts craft couldn't accomplish but might be accomplished with steerable beams.

Another possibility I made a thread about but you missed it while you were away was suggested by Tom Mahood who has a masters degree in physics. He was intrigued by some of the tests at area 51, and I had one of the videos that Lazar and friends shot in my thread, which showed some interesting performance, possibly more like a beam than a solid craft. I hope you already saw it because it was removed from youtube a few months after I posted it.

Anyway instead of two intersecting lasers, Mahood seems to think the light seen in that video of the area 51 test was from plasma resulting from the Bragg peak of a particle beam shot into the air. That was in 1989, and interestingly also in 1989 there was a test of BEAR-Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket- launched on a minuteman 2 rocket.

The design of this 1-m-long, lightweight (greater than 55 kg) accelerator incorporates four aluminum vane/cavity quadrants joined by an electroforming process.

If I mention particle accelerator people think of the miles long LHC but the reason for bringing that up is to show that they actually fit a ~55 kg accelerator in a 1m long experiment package so it's possible to make accelerators quite portable. We won't discover any new physics with a portable accelerator but they are not designed for that.


That was a star wars missile defense type test that could be used as a defensive weapon against incoming missiles, but Tom Mahood thinks the particle beam being tested at area 51 was probably not the same type of weapon, but maybe the purpose was to generate plasma decoys or something. He used some software to do some Bragg peak calculations and calculated how much energy the protons would need to create the Bragg peak at various distances in the atmosphere.

So thinking about the possibility Mahood's guess is right that they were testing a particle beam fired into the air and what was videoed was plasma from the Bragg peak, it would be easy to explain the jittery side to side motion seen in that video, which by the way Fravor described seeing jittery side to side motion of the "TicTac" he saw hovering above the water in 2004. So rapid movement side to side at a fixed distance would be easy and very responsive. Changing the distance might be trickier because it involves changing the energy of the protons and that may have more lag than side to side motion which could be very rapid when you consider the way an electron beam scans an entire CRT multiple times a second with rapid side to side movements.

Tom Mahood seems fairly convinced the proton beam or something like it is what was tested at Area 51 in 1989.

Given the similarities between the jittery motions of that and the jittery motions Fravor describes along with great maneuverability, I wondered if there could be a connection, and made a thread about it, but I don't think anybody here had any idea what a Bragg peak was, so I don't think anybody here knew what was talking about. Medical doctors might actually know something about the Bragg peak since it's utilized when proton beams penetrate to a specific depth in tissue to irradiate specific tissue at that depth.

Proton Radiosurgery

The dose distribution of a proton beam consists of a slowly rising dose, a rapid rise to a maximum (also known as the Bragg peak), followed by a fall to near zero. As a result, a significant portion of the beam energy is deposited in a small volume.

The Bragg peak for protons supposedly works similarly in air except the Bragg peak is a lot further away from the source in air than it is in human tissue, for protons of a given energy.

This is Mahood's technical article showing the software he used for Bragg peak calculations, and his results:

Proton Beam in Air Bragg Peak assessment

what if there were a way that (almost) anybody could model a proton beam through air and see if my “theory” was correct (“Theory” is in quotes because my knowledge base includes a lot more info than I’m going to publicly disclose).

I'm not sure how quickly the proton energies could be changed, so that may be a limitation of this particle beam versus the intersecting lasers method of generating plasma blobs. But the fact that it doesn't require other beams to intersect might be an advantage. What do you think of Mahood's hypothesis about proton beam Bragg peaks being the source of lights seen at Area 51 in 1989?

a reply to: ThatDamnDuckAgain

My bad - was responding to Penroc and got distracted for 30 mins looking for the previous discussion (which I didnt find).

@Arbi/MBK
This sort of stuff seems like a good candidate for the "possibilities" list and until they properly exclude directed energy applications (either intended or as a side effect) - it looks like they aren't doing their job properly.

In terms of deployment/stealth/power.....always wondered if trickle charging solar powered sat.'s with "better than conventional" energy density storage capability could be an option???

Thing that gets me is
1: what range has this thing have?
2:If range is proportional what platform does it come from?
3: Platform holds power source so how big platform?
4: Does platform operate in/on water or in/above Air?

a reply to: Blackfinger

See where you're going with it....all valid concerns/questions but all of that info is likely to be classified IF real.

If you wanted to sit down and hypothesise possibilities- you are limited to using the conventional calculations for directed energy output, atmospheric attenuation, energy density storage etc etc.

All it takes is a general improvement in overall capability (which you would keep secret) and suddenly - singing and dancing manifestations become a lot more feasible..

originally posted by: Blackfinger
Thing that gets me is
1: what range has this thing have?
2:If range is proportional what platform does it come from?
3: Platform holds power source so how big platform?
4: Does platform operate in/on water or in/above Air?

Good questions. When David Fravor saw his "TicTac", he first saw a disturbance in the water he thought was maybe the size of a commercial aircraft, so could there have been some platform near the surface of the water related to that Tic Tac? Seeing those two in such close proximity may not be a coincidence and one might wonder if whatever it was just under the water was sending directed energy or a particle beam above the water. That's the story Fravor tells us anyway, but Kevin Day says Fravor told him a different story of what happened, the day after it happened.

Extremely powerful lasers require huge power sources and the Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser Testbed used a 1 megawatt laser to destroy some missiles, but if your goal is to create some airborne plasma as a decoy and not to destroy something, presumably far less power is needed, and the platform could be much smaller than the YAL-1.

The range of the laser might depend on the frequency and how clear the air is at that frequency which will affect attenuation of the beam(s). Another concern is divergence, at greater distances the beams get wider.

For the particle beam possibility, as I mentioned in my previous post, the Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR) was a 1 meter long portable unit that fit in a rocket, so making something of similar power gives a number of options. If you want to increase the power then you might need something longer than one meter.

Tom Mahood provided the link to the software he used to calculate some ranges of the particle beam assuming various proton energy levels, but he showed two calculations he made with the software. This one is for 500 MeV protons (0.5 GeV), the plasma should appear at about 1.22 km from the source which he guessed might be in the ballpark of some of the Area 51 tests:

www.otherhand.org...


Apparently the range is related to the proton energy, but not linearly, since his calculation for 20 times more proton energy gives about 33 times the range or about 40.6 km:

originally posted by: Jukiodone
In terms of deployment/stealth/power.....always wondered if trickle charging solar powered sat.'s with "better than conventional" energy density storage capability could be an option???

I wondered about that too. If you wanted to make a short firing from a sat with a large burst of energy, I think what you would need is some kind of energy storage, maybe chemical-based or maybe a bank of capacitors. You might only get one shot and then have to re-charge for hours or days from solar power to get the next shot.

Alternatively if you don't want to destroy something but just want to create decoys, you might get more time out of whatever you're using for energy storage being discharged more slowly, but still, the time would be limited, so I suspect it would need a lot of "trickle charging" for a limited amount of "active use".

Thought about this for many a year....
www.abovetopsecret.com...


One of the associated rumours (which I cant find at all ) was this phase conjugate delay column made the output act differently to conventional lasers in that the directed energy arrived at it's destination (using geomagnetic/other conjugate points FFS) without distortion....

Would appreciate a slap from anyone who properly understands the premise if I am on a wild goose chase.

a reply to: Jukiodone
I have no idea about the rumors you mention. Bedlam's "fictional tale", which sounds decidedly less fictional Edward Fouche's fictional TR-3B tales, sounds like another alternative similar to Pulsed lasers. If it was real, it might have some advantages over the other pulsed laser methods mentioned at that link, but I don't know if the rumor you heard would apply or not.

If we are talking about laser-generated decoys, intended to fool an adversary into thinking the plasma decoy is a craft, I think a continuous laser or lasers would do a better job of making a decoy than a pulsed laser. If the adversary can notice the pulses, it might seem less like a real target, depending on how long the pulses are and the gaps between them, but the subject of Bedlam's tale sounded rather gappy.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: Blackfinger
Thing that gets me is
1: what range has this thing have?
2:If range is proportional what platform does it come from?
3: Platform holds power source so how big platform?
4: Does platform operate in/on water or in/above Air?

Good questions. When David Fravor saw his "TicTac", he first saw a disturbance in the water he thought was maybe the size of a commercial aircraft, so could there have been some platform near the surface of the water related to that Tic Tac? Seeing those two in such close proximity may not be a coincidence and one might wonder if whatever it was just under the water was sending directed energy or a particle beam above the water. That's the story Fravor tells us anyway, but Kevin Day says Fravor told him a different story of what happened, the day after it happened.

Extremely powerful lasers require huge power sources and the Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser Testbed used a 1 megawatt laser to destroy some missiles, but if your goal is to create some airborne plasma as a decoy and not to destroy something, presumably far less power is needed, and the platform could be much smaller than the YAL-1.

One thing that has happened since then is that high powered solid state lasers have become much more practical, enough so to be robust enough for military uses vs a complex and expensive chemical system.

For the particle beam possibility, as I mentioned in my previous post, the Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket (BEAR) was a 1 meter long portable unit that fit in a rocket, so making something of similar power gives a number of options. If you want to increase the power then you might need something longer than one meter.

I'm not sure the proton beam would be such a good idea, there seems to be much more of a developmental history and controllability with the lasers. The proton beam as mentioned tries to dissipate in a small spatial area, but that distance will depend on many atmospheric factors. Not so good for the intended application.

What struck me from the patent application was a description in the introduction that the IR emission spectrum of the plasma at the receiver could be tuned with the laser, almost like that was already existing known practice rather than what was being patented. That seems really important to me for a practical point of view. To be a good decoy you need to have the IR of the decoy look like the desired target of the missile's seeker, which presumably they know something about by open and clandestine intelligence. Now on your end you'd also be measuring that IR spectrum of your fake with your instruments and potentially in a closed loop control you can alter the laser's parameters as necessary to keep the signature at the desired point even despite changing atmospheric conditions. That seems to be important for a realistically deployable system in sea environment.

originally posted by: Jukiodone
Thought about this for many a year....
www.abovetopsecret.com...


One of the associated rumours (which I cant find at all ) was this phase conjugate delay column made the output act differently to conventional lasers in that the directed energy arrived at it's destination (using geomagnetic/other conjugate points FFS) without distortion....

Would appreciate a slap from anyone who properly understands the premise if I am on a wild goose chase.

Wow, that's a good one. OK, there are two different things happening, the phase conjugate stuff sounds sort of like adaptive optics or maybe some other trick to get the laser beam to avoid dispersion in the atmosphere or somehow correct for the atmospheric distortion like astronomers do, but in an active sense. This would be potentially a prerequisite or performance enhancer for your plasma decoy generator, maybe what's been under development for all those years.

What Bedlam is talking about is some stuff MUCH more exotic...... there the plasma would be part of the very complex atomic physics experiments that people have done (in university labs) with effectively slowing down the speed of light (in the plasma medium of course) by complex interactions maybe with quantum bose-einstein condensate effects? Maybe quantum plasma physics? I.e plasma physics that uses QM effects. Plasma physics just with James Clerk Maxwell and moving charges or MHD in the fluid regime is already insanely complex, hard to grok using quantum mechanics, in this case the specifc effects that happen with ultra cold atoms exhibit quantum mechanical behavior or when then quantum field nature of the EM field is important, i.e. real like electromagnetism isn't quite governed by the Maxwell equations though they are extremely good in nearly all cases (there's a QM waveform of a field, QFT).

The situation he seems to be discussing (rumored to take place in ~2004 though who knows if the dates are accurate or the names as Bedlam fuzzes stuff around) would be to use this to 'store' significant input laser input effectively into the degrees of freedom of the plasma and then trigger the release of that.

"The laser energy stored in the tube will come barreling out near c. The wavelength will be...proportionally decreased."

I think he's talking about a x-ray or gamma ray laser, or at least an x-ray/gamma flash bulb (incoherent vs a coherent laser), the directionality being the VERY important bit (going out in all THAT direction away from where my people are) which is different from the usual which is 4 pi steradians of unpleasanteness to any usual known big generator of x-rays or gamma rays (e.g. a nuclear weapon).

Presumably this could be intended for direct action missile defense?

Anyway, this doesn't seem like a plausible explanation for the UAP phenomena which seem to have continuous output. This wouldn't be used for a decoy vs a seeker. If it were to be deployable and it were to work, the effect upon shooting it would be that the target missile might drop suddenly if you managed to literally fry some control circuitry sufficiently. And that the operators would be wearing radiation badges as even tiny bit of backscatter up close might be unhealthy, to Unhealthy. And I'm not convinced something like this could at all be close to robust deployability vs something in a cryogenic chamber in a very isolated university lab which took a year of a postdoc's life to get up and running.

History:

The Standard 1970's ABM system relied on enormous 5 MT weapons going exoatmospherically, the secondary was surrounded by lots of literal gold, which happens to have a great x-ray cross section at the right frequencies. The goal there was the ABM nuke made a big burst of x-rays, and these x-rays would have a strong interaction with other high-Z materials, like the primary cores of plutonium in your enemy warheads barreling in. The x-rays would suddenly heat one side (only) and the thermal shock might be enough to crack them so that efficient implosion with good yield wouldn't happen.

Surely this is something which was tested in the tunnels in Nevada once upon a time.

Of course in this scenario you are already EMPing yourself with very efficient multiple multi-megaton warheads, so it's already lost.

In space the distances are still so large that they still needed to get within a few kilometers of the target, and with ICBM speeds this is still well split-second timing accuracy & targeting needed. With a 5 MT warhead. (Now you can see why ICBM defense is technically nearly impossible).

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: Jukiodone
I have no idea about the rumors you mention. Bedlam's "fictional tale", which sounds decidedly less fictional Edward Fouche's fictional TR-3B tales, sounds like another alternative similar to Pulsed lasers. If it was real, it might have some advantages over the other pulsed laser methods mentioned at that link, but I don't know if the rumor you heard would apply or not.

If we are talking about laser-generated decoys, intended to fool an adversary into thinking the plasma decoy is a craft, I think a continuous laser or lasers would do a better job of making a decoy than a pulsed laser. If the adversary can notice the pulses, it might seem less like a real target, depending on how long the pulses are and the gaps between them, but the subject of Bedlam's tale sounded rather gappy.

Oh I'm almost sure that the "regular" lasers are pulsed as well (strong fields on very short moments, low duty cycle), as you want to have a high electric field at very short intervals, strong enough that at least at that moment you can strip off the electrons to make a plasma, i.e. a spark. This is standard known technology now from what I can read.

BTW, Bedlam's super x-ray gamma-ray zapper is waaaaaaaay more exotic and would make photons which have a much higher energy, i.e. x-rays and gamma rays. If they are high enough energy when they interact with nuclei or even electrons you might be able to make electron-positron pairs. This might be the origin of the very fabled Big Red Button aka "Proteus" aka "sunburn from the inside"

vimeo.com...


aaaand in that previous thread (which Bedlam did NOT post on any forum where science people hung out)......

Make it on the fly, of course. How do YOU guys do it? That's what makes Proteus so spooky - you can honk a collimated relativistic beam of positronium at someone at the mA level.

I don't think I could take enough antioxidants


OK, so Proteus = Special Magic Atomic Physics to contain input laser energy in a Special Quantum Plasma which is then suddenly released, and gets hyper blue shifted into gamma rays. These then hit a target of lead or depleted uranium. Nearby the high Z nucleus with its very high electric fields the gammas can turn into e+e- pairs. And they keep some significant forward momentum of the gamma photon (which has to be at least 2x511keV) so positronium goes out the business end

Of course, if you want hot pair-on-pair action, it helps to have a Schwinger on hand.

That had to be the first decent dirty joke on quantum field theory ever

Lots to think about..../ read up on.

originally posted by: mbkennel


What struck me from the patent application was a description in the introduction that the IR emission spectrum of the plasma at the receiver could be tuned with the laser, almost like that was already existing known practice rather than what was being patented. That seems really important to me for a practical point of view.

QFT.

a reply to: Jukiodone

no I don't think there is anything particularly quantum about the IR decoy generation past the laser. Which needs only 1st quantization 'regular' quantum mechanics to understand the atomic transitions usually. The effects at the target cloud would be purely classical

The QFT stuff is way more weird.