Airborne laser system common path/common mode design approach

The ABL Beam Control design incorporates Common Path/Common Mode (CP/CM) architecture because it provides many important operational features, without which the system would have difficulty performing well in the stressing military environment. These features include 1) tolerance for optical misalignment, 2) elimination of the need for boresighting, 3) graceful degradation, 4) correct accounting for all optical path disturbances, 5) relaxed tolerances of optics, and 6) compensation for thermal disturbances. The concept for CP/CM operation, both in wavefront compensation and in automatic self-alignment and pointing, will be given. Experimental and simulation data will demonstrate the effectiveness of the CP/CM ABL approach.