Laser & operational safety in outdoor environments

An area of growing interest is the propagation of laser beams through the atmosphere for applications that range from point-to-point laser communications, remote sensing, self-driving vehicles, and defense/security applications. UCF’s Townes Institute Science and Technology Experimentation Facility (TISTEF) at Kennedy Space Center routinly performs outdoor testing with systems from eye-safety telecom applcations up to 5 TW peak powers and 10’s of KW’s CW, with a variety of personnel ranging from graduate students to seasoned professionals. This talk will present select experiences and lessons learned from our test campaigns on the range, while using and supporting laser propagation in challenging outdoor environments, and managing many personnel in and outside of the laser radiation control areas.