Quantum Parametric Mode Sorting Lidar (QPMS)

Lidars and laser altimeters have demonstrated that they can bring the third dimension to satellite remote sensing for Earth Science (ICESat, ICESat2, CALIPSO, GEDI, ADM Aeolus). For future lidars to increase scientific knowledge of our planet there will need to be new technologies and new techniques. Trending is important, but new understanding of our Earth using remote sensing requires new technologies. Some key lessons learned from these past lidars/altimeters are 1) solar background light always decreases their effectiveness during the day, and 2) scenes are easily obscured by cloud, blowing snow, or turbid water - again reducing measurement quality e.g., lowering detectability of objects below and introducing biases in the science products. With next generation systems in pre-phase A development, we need to look forward now to what will follow - development cycles are lengthy. The Quantum Parametric Mode Sorting (QPMS) lidar technique draws from developments created for Quantum Information Science (QIS). The technique uses a laser system tailored to emit in a unique Temporal-Frequency mode, a laser pulse made up of many photons all phase coherent within a pulse. The lidar receiver uses a nonlinear crystal carefully chosen to have a phase matching bandwidth smaller than the laser pulse bandwidth. This effectively creates a temporal/spectral filter, only photons in the correct mode are converted all other photons are rejected. This creates the perfect filter against background light. It also identifies signal photons that have passed through dense obscurations and still carry the precise time-of-flight to Earth scenes to allow mapping under a wider range of conditions. This is because highly multiple scattered photons will lose their intrapulse coherence and thus not be detected by the QPMS receiver. This is similar to Low-Coherence Interferometry, the basis to Optical Coherence Tomography, that allows imaging and ranging into dense tissue for medical applications. The system is currently at TRL 4 for 1550 nm having proven out the precise ranging even through optically dense obscuration and in the presence of strong background light. The most serious of limitations of traditional up-conversion technique have been addressed with funding from ESTO (ESTO ATI-QRS-20). For it to be useful for a broader range of Earth scenes the system must be adapted to the visible spectrum where there is much lower absorption, setting the entry of the proposed development to TRL 1 The proposed effort will extend the techniques to the visible and perform lab testing in snow and water scenes. For snow the objective is to precisely measure (mm resolution) snow depth up to 0.8 m and potentially characterize snowpack properties such as grain size/shape and snow water equivalent (SWE) a critical parameter as called out in the Decadal Survey. For water it is to increase the depth at which bathymetry can be performed in turbid water. The path to a packaged system for field demonstrations and eventual space application will be evaluated. This will advance the technique to TRL 3 and prepare it for actual Earth missions at NASA, e.g., for the future snow/hydrology missions and Surface Topography and Vegetation mission.

Enabling lower cost innovative remote sensing instrument development from concept through breadboard and demonstration

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