In Search of the Next Micron?

Lawrence Livermore National Lab's National Ignition Facility (NIF) Project presents numerous measurement challenges and tasks, demanding an extremely high level of precision and accuracy. This paper discusses some of the efforts to optimize, and better understand the results and looks at some of the alignment tools tested to lay hold of this complex task. The methodologies discussed were commonplace in the 'good old days' of land surveying. However, with the introduction of high accuracy equipment many of those practices have fallen by the wayside. This paper looks at the results of a series of in-depth, comparison measurements using three different laser tracker measurement instruments