Long-Range Compact Economical Lidar for Wind Profiling

Wind events, turbulence, wind shear, etc., are continuing to cause accidents and fatalities for aviation. As NASA strives to bring aviation services to more location, including urban locations, and increasingly relies on autonomous operation, the requirement to mitigate incidents caused by winds is imperative. To this end we propose a high-performance long-range wind profiling coherent-detection lidar system that achieves the NASA stated objectives and requirements. The system will provide high precision measurements beyond 20 km near-horizontal range in most conditions within the atmospheric boundary layer. The performance is achieved with a novel and optimized lidar system design. Since coherent lidar signal detection sensitivity favors pulse energy over pulse repetition rate, the increased range performance is enabled by the use of a high-energy crystal-based transmitter in contrast to a typical lower-pulse-energy fiber-based transmitters. This lidar operates at an optimal atmospheric transmission wavelength near 1.6 micron. Reliability and cost improvements are accomplished by miniaturization and advanced manufacturing techniques. The staff at Beyond Photonics have decades of experience in the development and deployment of remote sensing lidars and radars throughout the world, and we are confident that we can successfully execute the development of this affordable advanced high-performance lidar system. For the Phase 1 program we will leverage our experience to design and build a breadboard novel transmitter as the first step in the development of the lidar. Phase II would advance this to a complete brassboard coherent detection lidar transceiver.

NASA applications of this high-performance long-range lidar, include on-going efforts for aviation, PBL 3D-winds (e.g. NASA LaRC’s Wind-SP effort), and future developments directed at global winds; ground-based and airborne lidar programs; eyesafe remote laser spectroscopy applications for measurement of atmospheric methane and water vapor constituents; tracking fast-moving space debris and asteroid hazards; and other shortwave-IR wavelength instrument developments in the 1.5-to-2.0 micron wavelength region.

Non-NASA uses of the lidar include DoD wind profiling, hard target/space debris tracking/imaging and research/industrial applications requiring very compact and environmentally robust transmitters at eyesafe SWIR wavelengths. Development is planned for this compact high-performance remote-sensing instrument for winds and other sensing applications which will result in significant commercial sales.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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