For years, people have tried to come up with ways to steer bullets, and everyone has consistently said you can't do it. And you couldn't-if the bullet was spinning. A spinning bullet is too stable; you can't apply enough force to turn it off its axis of revolution. The secret sauce is that our bullet doesn't spin. It's kind of like a musket ball, which doesn't rotate, but with technology added to let us control where it goes. The .50-caliber bullet has an optical sensor in the nose that looks for a laser dot on a target. A battery-powered 8-bit processor uses a simple control algorithm to steer the projectile, adjusting its direction 30 times per second. Motors rotate four tiny fins to change their angles.
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