Atmospheric distortions in a retroreflected laser signal.
This paper presents and analyzes a model for the instantaneous received field that has been transmitted from a laser and then retroreflected from a corner cube, all in the presence of atmospheric turbulence and attenuation. The characteristics of this field are examined as a function of distance from the axis of the transmitted laser beam, and the merits of using shared optics (coaxial transmitter/receiver) from geometric and atmospheric considerations are examined. in particular, it is shown that angle-of-arrival (AOA) fluctuations induced by turbulence would be self-corrected in a retrosystem for a shared-optics configuration only if the transceiver and retroreflector are in each other's effective near fields or are separated by less than a self-correction range as defined in the text. The results are shown to be in agreement with recent experimental observations.
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RF
Lutomirski
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Warren