ARMY LASER HITS SATELLITE MARK; OUTCOME CONFIRMS VULNERABILITY.Byline: Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. Just after dusk in the New Mexican New Mexico Abbr. NM or N.M. or N.Mex. A state of the southwest United States on the Mexican border. It was admitted as the 47th state in 1912. desert, a high-powered Army laser trained its invisible beam on a U.S. satellite as it emerged from over the horizon to the north. With a burst of flame and smoke, the hulking hulk·ing also hulk·y adj. Unwieldy or bulky; massive. hulking Adjective big and ungainly Adj. 1. device generated a beam that shot up through the atmosphere at the small satellite 260 miles above the Earth. The test, conducted Friday at White Sands Missile Range White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), formerly known as the White Sands Proving Grounds, is a rocket range in New Mexico operated by the United States Army. The range covers an area of almost 3,200 mi² (8 287 km²), approximately three times the size of Rhode Island, making it , N.M., and announced Monday at the Pentagon, went off successfully, pointing to a possible new direction in warfare. Weeks after an initial failure, the Pentagon announced, the Army successfully fired its ``Miracl'' laser, an acronym for the 1980s-vintage Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser, at an aging Air Force satellite. Neither the satellite nor its target point - an infrared camera - was damaged or disabled in the several test firings lasting less than five seconds each. But the Pentagon views the test as concrete proof of a long-held concern: that its own satellites, as well as intelligence, civilian or commercial satellites, are vulnerable to laser weapons. Air Force Lt. Col. Bob Potter, a Pentagon spokesman, said the laser hit the target camera, which recorded data now being evaluated at White Sands White Sands, uninhabited desert area, S central N.Mex. It is a center for U.S. military-weapons research and testing. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded at Holloman Air Force Base (formerly Alamogordo Air Base). . Had the laser been turned up to full power or trained on its target longer, it could have destroyed the satellite. But the point of the test was to show that lower-intensity lasers may be able to disable To turn off; deactivate. See disabled. the information-gathering equipment, such as infrared sensors, mounted on U.S. military satellites. |
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