Heterodyne laser radar for space-object imaging: results from recent field experiments

摘要

Abstract: The Air Force Phillips Laboratory is in the process of demonstrating an advanced space surveillance capability with a heterodyne laser radar system to be used, among other applications, for range-resolved imaging and orbital element set determination. It has been shown using theory and computer simulations that superior image quality is obtained by first converting the heterodyne returns into intensity projections before using tomographic techniques to reconstruct an image, as compared to using tomographic techniques on the E- field projections directly. In this paper, data from recent field experiments is used to validate this theory. In addition, the field data is used to determine the closing velocity of an orbiting satellite as a function of time. !9