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A laser beam was fired into the New Mexico sky from the White Sands Missile
Range on 17 October and struck an obsolete American military satellite orbiting
some 420 kilometres overhead. But the controversial experiment, which had
previously been delayed
(This Week, 18 October, p 27), did not go as planned.
Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Potter, a Pentagon spokesman, says that although
ground-based sensors gathered data about the laser’s effects, sensors on the
satellite did not.