Autonomous beam alignment for coherent Doppler lidar with multielement detectors

摘要

Autonomous beam alignment for coherent Doppler lidar requires accurate information about optical misalignment and optical aberrations. A multielement heterodyne detector provides the required information without a loss in overall system performance. The effects of statistical variations from the random backscattered field (speckle field) are determined with computer simulations for both ground-based operation with a fixed calibration target and for space-based operation with random target backscatter.