危险空间碎片的天基激光雷达探测

小尺度危险空间碎片(厘米量级)是空间碎片监测的难点之一。针对厘米级空间碎片的探测需求,提出了一种基于天基激光雷达的主动探测新方案。该方案对激光强度进行宽带射频调制,并采用光学相干零差检测方式,通过chirp强度调制信号来获取空间碎片的距离和速度信息,在提高接收信噪比的同时简化了系统结构。首先简要介绍了该激光雷达的系统组成和工作原理,分析研究了系统在不同条件下的探测性能,并与传统直接检测激光雷达的探测性能进行了对比。理论分析和仿真结果表明,该探测方案是可行和有效的,对空间碎片的有效探测距离可达50 km以上。

Detection of space debris of centimeters in size via spaceborne ladar

It is rather difficult to monitor the dangerous space debris with size of centimeters level by conventional means.A novel system scheme based on spaceborne ladar was presented for detecting the dangerous space debris.The RF chirp waveform that modulated the intensity of laser with the AOM was utilized to extract the radial range and velocity of the debris,and the optical homodyne detection was adopted which can reduce the system complexity and improve the signal to noise ratio(SNR) of the output signal as well.The system components and operational principle were firstly introduced,and the detection performance under different conditions was investigated.A comparison of detection performance with the direct detection ladar was made as well.The theoretic analysis and numerical simulation show that the proposed ladar system proves feasible and effective,and the effective detection range can be up to more than 50 km.