High resolution laser imaging system.
Computations indicate that a synthetic aperture laser imaging system can provide images with 10-cm resolution at satellite ranges using a 10-W cw laser. When imaging satellites from the ground, the synthetic aperture system reduces atmospheric degradations. The system uses 20-cm diam receiver optics. The low laser power is made possible by using separate transmitter and receiver optics and coded pulses with a 50% transmitter duty cycle. The coded pulses are derived from Hadamard matrices for which there is an efficient algorithm to transform the received data into images. The synthetic aperture yields spatial resolutions independent of range, and the coded pulses result in an effective range dependence of r(-2)2 instead of r(-4).
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