High-Altitude airborne platform characterisation of adaptive optic corrected ground based laser

Abstract

Adaptive optics can be used for more than astronomical imaging with large telescopes. The Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) and the Space Environment Management Research Centre (SERC) at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia, have been developing adaptive optics (AO) for space environment management. Turbulence in the atmosphere causes optical signals to become degraded during propagation, which reduces the effective aperture of your transmitting or receiving telescope. An AO system measures and corrects for the turbulence in the atmosphere, allowing for greater resolution of optical signals. AO can be used to correct a laser beam propagating from the ground into space, or high-altitude airborne platform. The AO system performance depends heavily on the chosen site and system design. In order to properly design and implement a cost-effective AO system to propagate a laser into orbit, we propose using high-altitude platforms to measure AO system performance directly as a precursor in-orbit measurements. SERC plan on demonstrating remote manoeuvre of an orbiting object using photon pressure from an AO corrected high power ground based laser. The manoeuvre target will be a suitable piece of debris, or a dedicated satellite mission which is instrumented and tracked to measure the applied photon pressure and resulting orbit perturbation. High-altitude airborne platforms such as weather balloons or UAVs enable us to efficiently de-risk elements of this program by validating our numerical simulations of AO system performance with actual measurements. We are then able to confidently move towards in-orbit measurement of an AO corrected ground based laser, and remote manoeuvre with photon pressure. We present simulations along with experimental results for the development of array detectors which can be used to directly measure AO system performance. Show more