David Bober

An unmanned test vehicle tears out of the atmosphere.

You are the target.

Jasper is the only gun in the United States that can hit this broad a range of velocities and be used on plutonium.

Meet David Bober, the team lead for Jasper.

A Jasper target typically starts its lifecycle as some source of plutonium.

It could be a casting that we've made specifically for these sorts of science experiments.

And that will then be brought into a glove box.

The image in the public mind is the intro to Homer Simpson.

All I need is some plutonium.

He's got his hands in the gloves and the big window.

It's that, but done by professionals.

Once it's prepared, the experiment begins.

Jasper is an impact-driven launcher, impact-driven experiments.

So we throw a projectile at up to 8 kilometers per second at the target.

The old magic trick where the magician pretends to catch a bullet in their teeth.

We're really doing that.

But this bullet is traveling 10 times faster than a rifle bullet.

The portion of time where we are collecting useful data is less than a microsecond or one millionth of a second.

And that's actually maybe for our slower experiments.

Some of the more typical experiments, it's more like 100 nanoseconds.