The “One Shot” program originally aimed to give snipers the power to hit a target from 2000 meters away in winds as high as 40 miles per hour. In the first phases of the 3-year-old program, shooters used prototype rifles dressed with lasers and fancy computer hardware to do damage from 1,100 meters away in 18-mile-an-hour winds. The scope-mounted lasers can “see” wind turbulence in the path of the bullet and feed the data to computers, enabling real-time calculation of — and compensation for — the wind-blown trajectory.
read more at Danger Room | Wired.com.
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Posted 30 May 2010
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Tagged: military
Europe requires space-borne laser instruments that can provide information on the vertical scale of volcanic ash clouds.
Read more at
BBC News – ‘Space laser tech needed’ to measure volcanic ash.
Airborne lasers have “stripped” away thick rain forests to reveal new images of an ancient Maya metropolis that's far bigger than anyone had thought.
An April 2009 flyover of the Maya city of Caracol used Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) equipment—which bounces laser beams off the ground—to help scientists construct a 3-D map of the settlement in western Belize. The survey revealed previously unknown buildings, roads, and other features in just four days,
via Pictures: Massive Maya City Revealed by Lasers.
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Posted 22 May 2010
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Tagged: LiDAR, Maya
A 5-micrometer glass bead levitated in air by a single laser beam from below. This optical trap is formed by the force from the laser beam and the gravitational force on the bead. Tongcang Li, et. al. used a similar optical trap to study the Brownian motion of a trapped bead in air with ultra-high resolution. Their paper is published in Science.
via The University of Texas at Austin.
Dematic has introduced the Lasertrucks+ solution, which combines laser-guided pallet trucks with a voice-directed system to increase picking productivity for case-picking applications.
DEMATIC l LaserTrucks+.
A team of physicists led by a professor at UC San Diego has pinpointed the location of a long lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago that many scientists had unsuccessfully searched for and never expected would be found.
The French-built laser reflector was sent aboard the unmanned Luna 17 mission, which landed on the moon November 17, 1970, releasing a robotic rover that roamed the lunar surface and carried the missing laser reflector. The Soviet lander and its rover, called Lunokhod 1, were last heard from on September 14, 1971.
“No one had seen the reflector since 1971,” said Tom Murphy, an associate professor of physics at UCSD. He heads a team of scientists engaged in a long-term effort to look for deviations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity by measuring the shape of the lunar orbit to within an accuracy of one millimeter, or about the thickness of a paperclip. This is accomplished by timing the reflections of pulses of laser light from reflectors left on the moon by Apollo astronauts and turning the timing measurement into a distance. Continue Reading »
Ten scientific institutions from Spain and Portugal have joined forces to create the SPALINET lidar network, radars with laser technology intended to study the aerosols in the atmosphere. The aim of the team is to homogenise and enhance the quality of measurements in order to better understand the scattering of these particles in the sky over the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands.
via EurekAlert.
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Posted 21 April 2010
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Tagged: LiDAR
