USA As Represented by Secretary of the Navy

Apti Inc.

Adam T Drobot

Phillip A Sprangle

Wallace M Manheimer

Kwo R Chu

Victor L Granatstein

J Laurence Safter

A defense system and a method for discriminating between armed re-entry vehicles and unarmed objects which are in close proximity of each other. The re-entry vehicles and the unarmed objects are bathed in a cloud of relativistic electrons with the resulting signatures from heavy objects, i.e., re-entry vehicles, being imaged directly. Detectors sense the location and identify of the re-entry vehicles and passes this information onto a weapons platform for tracking and interception.

Defense system for discriminating between objects in space

An apparatus for amplifying coherent radiation at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths includes the combination of a travelling-wave-tube cyclotron-maser-amplifier structure and a magnetron-injection electron gun. The amplifier structure includes a fast-wave drift tube and an electromagnetic wave launcher within the bore of a superconducting magnet. The magnetron-injection electron gun is also within the bore of the magnet and is coupled to the drift tube. As a travelling wave is launched in a preferred mode in the drift tube, the electron gun injects an annular beam of relativistic electrons having both large energy transverse to the axis of the device and small energy spread into the drift tube so that the electrons gyrate at their cyclotron frequency in orbits about the lines of the axial magnetic field produced by the magnet. The travelling wave is amplified by extracting energy from the relativistic electron beam. Efficiency of this energy transfer is optimized by tapering the magnetic field near the output end of the wave-beam interaction region.

Gyrotron travelling-wave amplifier

An electron beam and collective ion-electron beam accelerating apparatus in hich a relativistic electron beam and ions moving with it are accelerated in speed by passing them through a converging waveguide (i.e., a drift tube) of gradually decreasing diameter. The ions are separated from the electrons upon leaving the waveguide.

Growing community of inventors

Annandale, VA, United States of America

Adam T Drobot