Inside NIF's target chamber, the 192 laser beams finally converge on a central point. The chamber is a sphere 32 feet in diameter, with portholes for monitoring and recording the fusion experiments.

The target must be positioned inside the chamber with incredible accuracy, because the laser beams must all hit within 50 microns of the same precise point--less than the thickness of a piece of paper. The lasers blast the target with up to 500 trillion watts of power for 20 billionths of a second.