Sandia Labs Develops Self-Guided Bullet

Sandia Labs, home to some of the brightest minds in nuclear physics, has announced a self-guided bullet that is capable of hitting a target a mile away. Most people have become accustomed to the idea of guided missiles, we see them in action in news clips hitting targets in remote parts of the world. Those missiles are more than self guided however, they're also self targeted. These new bullets that have been developed have just a enough smarts embedded in them to follow a laser guided path.

Popular Science calls them a laser guided dart, but that's just semantics. In reality, they are long thin bullets with fins on their sides to control their flight. Unlike guided missiles, they have no power of their own, instead, they are fired from a rifle just like regular ordinary bullets. To guide the bullet to its target a small sensor is embedded in the head that is capable of reading laser light. Data from the sensor is sent to a very small, low power microprocessor that reads the distance from the laser light and converts that into signals that are sent to the fins on the side to adjust the flight path. This all happens thirty times a second to keep the bullet flying directly towards the target, even if the target moves after the trigger on the gun has been pulled.

On the down side, because the bullet is guided by a laser beam, that means that the rifle has to have a laser on it and then the shooter must keep that laser beam fixed on the target until the bullet strikes it, which could be difficult in some scenarios.

Another difference between this new bullet and conventional typles is the lack of rifling, which is where grooves are cut into the barrel of a rifle to cause the bullet passing through it to spin. Spinning a bullet causes it to move forward in a straight line, making the whole process more accurate. With the new bullet however, there is no rifling, because the bullet doesn't need to spin to be accurate. This means that rifles that shoot the new kind of bullet would have to be made specifically for the new bullet likely driving up the cost.

It's not likely that such a bullet would be used in conventional guns anyway, more than likely, they would replace sniper rifles and thus could be used by both the military and police officers.