Ultra High Speed Aero Optics Compensation

Aberrations due to aero optics effects around a turret in flight cause degradation of any optical beam traversing the turret. The degradation causes reduction in system performance of directed energy weapons in terms of the lethality range and increased dwell time as the energy on target is reduced. Kestrel Corporation has developed a new wavefront sensors based on measuring the curvature of the incoming wavefront to control an adaptive optics system. It has been shown that an adaptive optics system using this technology has superior performance to conventional Shack-Hartmann systems. Following the work on phase I demonstrating the performance benefits, this phase II proposal will build and test a demonstration adaptive optics system specifically for correction of aero-optics aberrations. The demonstrator will be evaluated against a set of aero optics phase screens also built during this Phase II project, and optionally in a government specified wind tunnel.