Description: Eye-safe coherent lidar technology holds increasing promise of meeting NASA's demanding remote 3D space winds goal near term. Highly autonomous, long-range coherent lidar systems may suffer significant SNR loss due to environment-induced component misalignment. Although systems can be engineered with the required alignment stability, the overall size, mass, and cost to produce coherent lidar systems will benefit from incorporating technology into the design that allows alignment to be optimized automatically while the system is in the field. This will especially benefit autonomous airborne and space based lidar systems where maintaining peak performance is critical without regular human intervention. Auto-alignment technologies will result in lower-cost sensors with greater autonomy and less-exotic mechanical engineering, resulting in high commercial potential due to the rapid introduction of lidar systems into the commercial marketplace for various applications. The technology aimed at maintaining laser and lidar alignment also has potential to correct for receiver lag angle in scanning lidar systems, which will facilitate faster scan rates, larger apertures, and greater area coverage rate capability. Beyond Photonics has a strong interest in solving these technological problems for relevant ground-based, airborne, and space-based unattended lidar systems. This Phase I effort will investigate auto-alignment designs exhibiting a high level of synergy between NASA's and other commercial vendor�s requirements for laser auto-alignment, transmit/receive transceiver auto-alignment, and lag angle compensation.

Benefits: Potential NASA applications for the lower-cost, higher-reliability autonomous laser and lidar alignment technology include the existing NASA LaRC DAWN lidar system (which currently suffers from thermally-induced environmental system misalignment that would readily be addressed by this technology with very low impact on existing architecture) and future generations of this wind measurement lidar system. The technology can be easily extended to other wavelengths (e.g. 1.55-1.6 um), which could directly benefit NASA programs aimed at atmospheric CO2 or CH4 measurement using lidar systems and other laser remote sensing efforts where long-duration unattended operation is key. Space-based applications are of particular interest.

Potential non-NASA, commercial applications for the lower-cost, higher reliability autonomous coherent laser radar sensors that would be realized from the proposed work include, use of such systems in wind energy management and site location applications; at airports for detection of hazardous aircraft wake vortices and wind shear, increasing airport operating efficiency; hard-target sensing, identification, and imaging applications. The auto-alignment concept will find many commercial applications wherever two or more beams need to be aligned to each other, such as is often required in non-linear optics, IR spectroscopy applications, and single-mode fiber beam combination and management.