Power Beaming Results, Nov. 3rd 2009
Written by Tom Nugent on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
First, the (relatively) big news: LaserMotive today beamed roughly 400 watts of laser power to a moving target at a distance of 1 kilometer, as part of the vertical laser alignment procedure. The target was a retro-reflective board a little larger than 1 meter on a side. I don’t know offhand if that is a record; I will have to check once things calm down. (It’s a record that will likely be broken tomorrow by one or more teams, of course.)
And now let’s back up. Things have been very exciting at the competition so far (you can follow our Twitter feed at #LaserMotive and the SE Blog’s tweeting at #SEGames). Sunday we did a bunch of setup at the staging area, which went well. We felt good about how much we did in the time available. Monday had us going out to the lakebed, where we got re-situated and settled in for the whole week. We did our alignment in the trailer, and at the end of the day when we did the 300 meter horizontal laser alignment, we did not have to tweak anything — the beams were as centered (relative to our tracking camera view) as we could tell. Throughout all of this, our entire team has been doing great work getting all of our systems (climber vehicle systems, tracking, command center ops, etc.) up and operational, and it appears that nothing was damaged during the trip down from Seattle.
Tuesday was the start of helicopter operations. There were a number of problems with test climber vehicle launch and landings for other teams, because things were not as smooth as they’d been during the tests in Washington. The launches and landings here were more “violent” and our causing quite a bit of concern. Multiple teams are working frantically tonight trying to deal with what we all saw today. And as I mentioned above, we did our vertical 1 kilometer alignment at the (relativeyl) low power of roughly 400 watts output, at the very end of the day. We are the first (and so far only) team to have completed vertical laser alignment. Wednesday morning we expect there will be more helicopter tests of climber launch & landing plus final vertical alignment for the other two teams. Then the real competition begins!
Here are some photos that we tweeted this week:
- Tom in our command center
- Lunch on the lakebed
- (Lack of) humidity on the lakebed
- Another beautiful morning on the lakebed (thanks to all our sponsors!)
- Most of our team in the command center, waiting for helicopter operations to begin again.
- View of the ground-apex and the cable from inside our trailer, just after we finished our vertical laser alignment.
It’s time for me to go to bed. We arrive at Dryden (a half hour from our hotel) before 5am each day, and we don’t seem to get back to the hotel until after 7pm or 8pm, and then do things like blog and talk to our families. We see the (nice full) moon setting when we start the day, and we see it rising when we end the day. We’ll all be glad to get a regular night’s sleep one of these days!